Throwback: Champ Barista takes on Joe Average Coffee
Throwback to 2014 where NZ Barista champ drinks some average coffee, for clicks.
This is a repost from 2014 - a part of my slow but steady migration of the lost posts of The Magic Roast over to Substack.
I’ve chosen this one after my Road trip coffee post, as I (back in 2014) had a crack at a barista champ drinking Wild Bean coffee - which, at the time, had been voted to have some of the best coffee in the country.
While you’re here, Buy me a coffee! It’s an easy way to support The Magic Roast - a blog that reposts old content instead of writing new stuff.
Champ Barista takes on Joe Average Coffee
Over the weekend here in New Zilland there was an article in one of the big papers that had New Zealand Barista Champ, Hanna Teramoto from Espresso Workshop, rate some of the big chain coffees in Auckland.
The article notes:
Canstar Blue asked 1427 people to rate 10 coffee shop chains on a range of categories including menu options, taste of coffee, service and value for money.
Wild Bean drew five out of five stars in seven of the eight categories.
"We all tend to remember road trips fondly but not so much stopping at some service stations along the way for food," said Wild Bean's national food service manager Scot Graham. "Those days are well and truly gone, we have revolutionised our industry, so much so that we are now outperforming the established coffee chains."
Hanna blind tested a range of long blacks and gave us her expert opinion.
Of course they weren’t great, but that got me thinking - is it fair to have these coffees rated by an expert in the coffee world? I don’t think it is, and here is why:
Coffee chains make coffee for Joe Average Kiwi
It’s a shame, but most Kiwi’s don’t drink great coffee – that is, coffee that is of specialty grade (scores more than 80/100 in taste tests). Most Kiwi’s drink average coffee – coffee that is of lower quality or what is called “commodity grade”.
Why does this matter? Well, it means that the baseline for what most people probably call good coffee is low, so anything made by a barista in a coffee shop is probably a whole lot better than what they are used to. And this is what the coffee chains aim for – consistently better coffee than what joe Kiwi is used to.
It makes perfect sense then that cafes like Wild Bean (a petrol station) or Starbucks get highly rated in surveys like the one the Herald article refers.
So, with than in mind, is it okay to get the best barista in the country to rate those coffees? No!
Hanna Teramoto is probably used to consistently great coffee
Getting one of the best in the industry to taste chain coffees is like getting Gordon Ramsay to taste test fast food. His benchmark is extremely high, so McDonalds or Burger King will never rate well from his perspective.
This, in my humble opinion, is what the issue is with this taste test. Hanna is probably used to drinking great coffee, made by experts (such has herself) with specialty coffee.
No surprise that some of her comments include: "You know when you're making concrete? It smells like that," she said of Starbucks' offering. "It tastes like burned tyre," was her verdict on the Coffee Club brew.”
Is this a bad thing? Well, maybe not a bad thing, but unfair to those companies selling that coffee – and let’s be clear, I don’t drink coffee from those places because it is generally not great, but Joe Average Kiwi does – and an article like this may unfairly influence them.
Would I have done anything different with the article? Well, yes.
Firstly I would have got two people to blind taste test it. Hanna and maybe someone who isn’t as well versed in the high end coffee world, maybe a barista from Coffee Club or something. Get a wider perspective on the coffee.
And secondly, I would have taken the opportunity to introduce people to the other end of the scale – include a Flight Coffee, Supreme or Espresso Workshop coffee in the mix and then provide an opinion on what is better.
Maybe I am missing the point of the article. Maybe I’m being too harsh on the chains, calling them Joe Average coffee. Oh well.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments.
In 2022, do I still feel the same?
Yeah, I do. It think it was an unfair comparison to do - but it wasn’t Hanna’s fault, more the fault of the click-baity journo. They could have used Hanna’s status as the country’s best barista to push the amazing story of coffee, and used her knowledge to help “Joe Average Kiwi” to find great coffee themselves.
I think they missed a trick.