This post is actually somewhat inspired by a recent rant. I do like a good rant, and Karl Purdy delivered a fine one on the Forkncork forums following the Irish Barista Championships. Karl’s a good guy, and as many are no doubt aware has played a big role in moving quality in the coffee scene in Ireland forward. I completely understand his sentiments, he is one of a very small number of people in Ireland who are keeping pace with international Speciality Coffee standards. By very small number, I would say, count on one hand, with fingers to spare.

His penultimate sentence stuck with me:

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I’m writing this now, reflecting at home after the semi finals of the Irish Barista Championships (with no intention of posting this until after the competition). I’m pleased to report I’ve made the final 6, but disappointed with nearly everything else. Some early small, unnecessary mistakes threw me so much that I made a spectacular series of mistakes. It felt as though the wheels were about to come off at any point and some inner sub-conscious force propelled me forward. It wasn’t the performance I planned, and it certainly wasn’t the performance the coffee in particular deserved.

I guess in way it was an incredibly concentrated learning experience.

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Craft, for me, has become a bit of a dirty word. It should be a positive word. It should indicate a degree of skill and care, the mark of a skilled professional in tune with his task. However, it seems to have gained a somewhat widespread use in coffee circles as a defensive argument against the adoption of more scientific control of parameters, whether brewing or roasting. While I accept that certain individuals can achieve good degrees of consistency through acutely tuned combinations of their senses, a greater majority seem to use the craft argument as a convenient opt-out.

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I’m giving up predicting things. My predictions for the Brazil CoE, frankly, did not correlate well with reality. So this addendum will focus on simple observations, while clairvoyance will take a backseat.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics. The Cup of Excellence is now in its third decade of existence. That, while technically true, is also quite misleading, given that last summer was its tenth anniversary. Nonetheless, that is a striking amount of time for a competition that kicked-off humbly in Brazil in 1999, with the number one coffee receiving what would now seem a very modest $2.60 high bid, while other coffees received only a fraction above the commodity price of the time. The competition has matured enormously, spread to 9 countries (including one-night stand Rwanda), and record prices for those countries have been set and broken in the process.

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