Barista Basics

What a fantastic birthday present, I absolutely loved doing this course with my younger sister! It’s not that I want to be a barista, but I am addicted to Coffee, and it would be a crime to love something so much, and not have an educated appreciation of it.
The course took us through the history of the coffee bean, and how to identify different types of beans, either Arabica, or Robusta. Two people per coffee machine, we were taught lecture style, about the technique, and then asked to do it ourselves with guidance. Starting with technique to froth and pour milk, then coffee.
So there are several things required to be correct for a good coffee:
— Water at 92 degrees
— 7 grams of ground coffee
— 30ml of pressurised water
— 18kg of force when compacting coffee
— between 20 – 30 seconds to push the pressurised water through the ground coffee
It was a great time, and they also offer coffee froth art classes, to do on the same day.

I decided to enrol in a coffee making course here last year; not because I wanted to become a barista: but just for fun to sharpen up my coffee making skills from when I was ding a bit of barista work 12 years earlier. It was amazing how quickly making those cappuccinos and lattes came back to me.
It was heaps of fun, although it was a bit cramped having to share a coffee machine with another person; although it was around the MasterChef time, and the foodies wanted to do more and more with their creativity; especially when cooking courses were also in vogue.
It was great to be served a delicious hot chocolate by Babette before I started my 3 hour all you can make coffee journey on a Saturday afternoon, and I actually now know how to make chai lattes too. It was easy to make the coffees, drink them and then bin them. I felt sorry for the cows that afternoon considering that I used a garbage bin full of milk while singing to the music and bopping around while I was making the coffees. At the end of the course I was exhausted. They then taught us how to clean the coffee machines, and I was just way too tired to listen.