Coffee Skills: The Daily Routines of a

Specialty Barista
Want to be the best barista you can be? A few weeks ago I wrote about the need to find your passion,
to further your education, and to practise your skills. But while these are all traits of an excellent barista,
there are also small actions we can take every single day to serve better specialty coffee.

Together with Capetonian barista Arno Q Els, I came up with four things that will make the difference
on a daily basis.

1. Preparation
Specialty coffee demands more of you than standard coffee – and so do your customers! You’ll need
to be prepared to meet these high expectations. Make sure your espresso machine is set up before you
open, and all your brew methods are ready to go. Keep extra cups packed on top of the espresso
machine and have spare pour-over filters to hand. It’s the extra efficiency here that will allow you to
make truly specialty coffee.

2. Coffee Equipment Maintenance

Speaking of being prepared, that extends to your equipment. Daily maintenance procedures should be
performed to a consistently high quality. Our customers deserve the best – and we can’t deliver that if
our espresso machine needs cleaning or our grinder’s burrs need replacing.

It’s easy to get so caught up in extraction, recipe creation, and latte art that we forget these more
“boring”, technical aspects – but they have just as big an impact when we’re trying to produce the
perfect cup.

3. Recipe Customisation
As specialty baristas, we have the privilege of working with some of the most beautiful coffees in the
world. And not one of them is the same. How do we get the best out of each coffee? With patience,
experience, and a lot of experimentation.

We work with single origins and blends. We brew coffees from different origins processed in different
ways. We use espresso machines, AeroPresses, pourovers, and syphons. And as a result, the variables
and parameters change constantly. The perfect recipe for each coffee is an exciting challenge – and as
we keep playing, experimenting, and thinking with an open mind, we’ll produce even better coffee.
(Just make sure you drink the experiments, not your customers!)
4. Commitment
We need to be committed to our coffee but even more so to our customers. And we need to be
committed not just every day but with every drink. Because that is ultimately why we spend our time
serving customers: it’s this passion that makes us a barista rather than a coffee lover. What’s more,
Oor growth as a coffee professional goes hand in hand with our service delivery.

So get to know your customers and what they enjoy about coffee. You’ll quickly figure out who is
keen to hear your recommendations for new coffees – and who just wants a flat white. And then make
that your recommendations, and your drinks, are made and served to the best of your abilities. Because
our journey to find the “perfect cup” has the potential to be an adventure for your customers too.

We all want to be the best barista we can be. And this means dedicating ourselves over the long term
to coffee education, practising our skills, and more. But it also means giving it our all every day. Let’s
be prepared, let’s look after our equipment, and let’s be meticulous in our commitment to serving the
most delicious cup of coffee possible to our customers. Love what you do and keep making coffee!

Written by S. Aupiais with input from Arno Q Els. Feature photo credit: Green Door via Andy
Anderson.

Perfect Daily Grind