Aug. 10, 2011 - Issue #825: The Fringe
Grinding the competition
Café Haven barista Alix Osinchuk strives for the perfect espresso
» Alix Osinchuk of Sherwood Park's Café Haven / Eden Munro
Alix Osinchuk is not the jittery, highly caffeinated person you might think of when you think of—if you ever think of—a competitive barista. She's nervous to be sure: just a few days after we spoke, she was dropped into the pressure cooker that is the 2011 Prairie Regional Barista Competition.
It's somewhat odd that Osinchuk is competing at all: until she took a job at Sherwood Park's Café Haven, she wasn't a coffee drinker. Discovering the science behind espresso—the minute calculations of water temperature, volume, angle and distance that go into making the perfect cup of coffee—hooked her into that world and stoked a competitive fire within her.
"I'm a very scientific and logical person, so when I found that there's so much more behind making drinks and making coffee, I enjoyed mixing things together and trying to see what comes out," she says. "I gave [competing] a try and it just kind of escalated."
The Prairie Regional Barista Competition is a feeder event for the Canadian National Barista Championship, which in turn sends its top competitors to the World Barista Championship. Thirteen competitors from across the prairies converged on Fratello Coffee Roasters in Calgary. Competitors have 15 minutes to make three drinks for four judges—a total of 12 drinks—in 15 minutes. One round is espresso shots, another is cappuccinos and the final is the signature drink, concocted by the competitor themselves to bring out the natural flavours in the espresso as well as wow the judges with its ingenuity.
Everything—from the place settings used, to the music playing in the background—is controlled by the competitor during their 15 minutes. The only thing that can't be tampered with is the machine. Everything else is controlled to the micron, beginning with the coffee. For the competition, Osinchuk decided on an Ethiopian Duromina, one of a number suggested by Café Haven's bean supplier, Stumptown Coffee Roasters.
"I like a lot of the interesting florals and the citrus and orange components to it, she says. "It was very dynamic and interesting in that sense."
Picking the coffee allowed Osinchuk to begin work on her signature drink—a mixture of espresso and a reduction made from stone fruits and tea.
"It really depends on the flavours that are already in there—you want to complement the espresso," she says of her creative process. "It also depends on your concept, and my overlying concept was clarity. I wanted to focus on the fact the coffee is really clean, so I chose really clean flavours to highlight that."
The search for the perfect milk to pair with her espresso dominated the work Osinchuk did to craft her cappuccinos. In an effort to tell a good story—presentation being a big part of the competition—Osinchuk sought local and organic sources of milk, but found them too buttery and too powerful in flavour, which would threaten to overpower the espresso. In the end, she went with a plainer milk.
"You want to use flavours that are plain and simple," she says, mentioning that she went so far as to try some unpasteurized milk a café customer brought in from his farm. "It was a little bit grassy, and it was very sweet."
Once all of the elements are in place, the practice can begin. After the café closes, Osinchuk takes to the coffee grinder, figuring out how fine the coffee must be ground to taste best. She has spent hours determining on which day after roasting the coffee is at its peak—it turns out it's six. She has experimented with ripening fruits in paper bags, plastic bags, inside a refrigerator and out in the open to determine the best time to use them for her signature drink, and she's performed her 15-minute presentation more than a dozen times. She even went down to Seattle to Stumptown to see the coffee being roasted and meet with the company's barista.
"I visited with a competitor who competes quite often in the US and has gone to the US nationals and has been in the top of her region, and she's given me a lot of pointers, a lot of guidance," she says. "It was really good to see where our coffee comes from and the people behind it too."
After all of the late nights in the café, the hours on the grinder, the trip to Seattle, it all came down to 15 minutes in front of four judges in a warehouse off of Calgary's Blackfoot Trail. Out of 13 competitors, the top four would move on to nationals.
A bout of nerves caused Osinchuk to start steeping her tea later than she would have liked to—in the middle of her presentation instead of the beginning—but she regained her composure and finished sixth, slightly out of going to nationals, but somewhere she felt proud to be.
"Everyone that placed above me had already been to nationals at least a few times," she says. "I felt happy with my placement."
The spoils of competitions are something to strive for, but the efforts are spoils unto themselves. There's likely no better place to learn the value of commitment to a cause than in a coffee shop, tamping grounds one more time while the sun is just rising. Similarly, there's likely no better place to test your mettle than in a warehouse in Calgary, against a dozen others on a machine calibrated so that the pressure within it matches that which is on you.
There are also more tangible benefits to competition: it has increased Osinchuk's efficiency and allowed her to learn techniques she can pass onto to the rest of Café Haven's staff. It's developed a deep knowledge and passion for coffee that customers pick up on.
Resiliency is a further lesson, one Osinchuk considers as she decides whether or not to train for next year's competition.
"We'll see how things go," she says. "Most likely I'll go back." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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