Battle of Barista

I believe that a lot of people now a day are love to drink coffee, that’s why more and more café is being open in Penang… but there still a lot of people not knowing about the different between the gourmet coffee and the instant coffee. May be you will know the different to have a coffee at café and to have an instant coffee at home is the method of making. But to brew a nice coffee is not that easy, it really required a lot of knowledge and practices to make a gourmet coffee in fresh, tasty and healthy.

The first barista competition in Penang was held at Gurney Plaza, and my friend Victor Leong was one of the sponsors and judge of the contest. By the invitation, I got the chance to have photographing along the contest. By the way, I am also a coffee lover, as before that I am not really know about gourmet coffee, he is the one who told me a lot of info about the coffee on how to taste the coffee in healthy and tasty way, as I have a bad impression before that the coffee is a kind of thing to make my heart beat faster and loose of concentration although it can help to kill of sleepy, but after his intro and showing me to turn into taking fresh gourmet coffee instead of the instant coffee, I really feel way better without the problem that I seen.

Well, back to the topic, when I reach the new wing of Gurney Plaza, I saw Victor was busing on the machine and the area setup, as he told me the contest will gonna start soon, and he would like to make the contest as same as the standard follows international contest standard. The contest area has two brewing machines and grinding machines setting at both left and right side from the judges table for two contesters, after the introduction of the rules and all the hardware setting, the contest had started. Every contester was given 15 minutes to prepare their tools, setting the grinding machine to grind the fresh roasted bean into powder and taste the espresso they brew, and once the preparation time is end, they are not allowed to touch any thing on the table until the judge call them to start making their coffee. 15 minutes are given for the contesters to make 3 kinds of drinks which are Espresso, Cappuccino, and own signature drink, and 4 cups of each kind of drinks need to present to the judges. I wonder how amazing the contesters need to control their time to make the nice coffee. During the contesters making the coffee, there will have a technical judge to the way they handle the tools and the method they use to suppress the coffee powder, and the way they clean up the brewing machine. And of cause, the other 3 judges are judging the taste of the coffee that the contesters presented.

During the contest, the contesters are really fight for the timing and also the taste of the coffee, by the way to bring out their own creativity on the signature drink. The Aroma of the coffee was really killing off my nose that day, perhaps it was making me more hunger for tasting the drinks…but I know that this is really the best effort of all the contesters to brew out such a nice tasty coffee…