the long, silver paved road
Sit down with me. Let’s talk about what we’re trying to do here.
Brewers’ Cup preparation, especially if you’re doing it for the first time, is a lot of work and a lot of thoughts. More thoughts than anybody can recall months later. Actually, the amount of thoughts one goes through is not healthy for anybody, which is why it is very wise to get a likeminded coach onboard. Not like I did that.
At least it is very recommended to get feedback and second opinions from people you trust with this kinda shit. And that’s what I did. I did not have a coach or anybody else that would be able to give a full account of this journey, so this following article is going to carry the biases of my memory.
who knows
I’m sharing this for anybody to get a realistic overview of the efforts going into your (first) routine
I believe it might be very valuable to document the brutal honesty of what people go through to do this kind of work, what it takes, where I struggled and have this data recorded for my and your future use. I’m going to talk about the aspects and variables that I researched, tested and had to call decisions on with focus on necessity, controllability and date of final decisions. This text will further shed light on the biggest struggles and puzzles and which variables they concerned in which way.
I will portray the people that really factually helped me the most in my progress, how they did it. This paints a picture of how interconnected every aspect of our egomaniacal specialty coffee career culture is.
I find this last chapter the most important one: resources. To demystify competitions and stardom won in them, I will try to give a detailed account of the physical, mental, social and financial costs of this project. I could not find any other such account of national comps before I set out to do it. Costs - since obviously the benefits gained are not quantifiable yet writing this a week after.
“I wanted to see it all and get to know it all and that’s the price I spent.”
The point of providing a detailed story of building a competitive, first time Brewers Cup nationals attempt that might inform future attempts is that sharing about these aspects hopefully leads to more exchange on this “back office” work behind the competition weekend regardless of style, personal preference. Once you’ll have read all of this you’ll agree attempting these competitions is mostly a question of managing a complex project.
The aspects and variables building a comp set up
Coffee:
obviously the most important one. I started working on this variable very early on, starting to talk with roasters about potential coffees at Barista Roku 24 in Prague in March 2024. This started several rounds of cuppings between March and June that helped me shape an analytical understanding as well as preferences for every individual category that is relevant for a Brewers Cup Open Service Coffee. In the meantime I led several failing contacts with roasters (3 Czech, 1 Italian). These didn’t work out mostly due to them not being able to dedicate staff resources to such projects.
The contact with my eventual roaster started in September. During a blind cupping of the samples I was offered, both my boss (who just happened to be present and represents way more experience assessing coffees as well as different personal preferences) and I favored the same cup for the same reasons. I instantly brewed this coffee with a stage appropriate recipe which confirmed my choice 100%.
Amount: 1.5kg (roasted)
Choosing the right coffee is of highest necessity. The right coffee is the right coffee for you. For me, this meant buying, analyzing and affectionally evaluating highly rated coffees early on in my preparation – indepently of whether I would’ve bought them for myself usually. This is a very costly and maybe not entirely necessary process.
Your coffee will never be entirely controllable, not even if you have total control over roasting and roast exact test batches just to analyze aging under different circumstances for all of those in advance. I did not have either of those. I had trust in the coffee I picked and the roaster that offered it to me. However, a lot of work is needed for everyone with any coffee to bring the best cup to the table on Open Service day. For me this meant about 4 hours of testing, doing 4 brews each on day 2 and day 1 before Open Service day and I lost a lot of sleep due to the late afternoon caffeine intake.
Date of final decision: 19 Days before Open Service, 17 days before comp (on my bday too).
Drippers:
I started this year very confident to go with one of my trusted brewers. After evaluating their customer service response to my inquiry and being sure that a co-competitor would enter Brewers Cup with their detailed support I dared myself to look for piu o meno conical brewers that could still deliver a very rich and smooth cup (personal preference). I think this decision paired incredibly well with my rather light, juicy and floral comp coffee. I seriously considered two very very nice brewers that combine functional design with a nice style and great usability. I went with the one that asked for less adjustments to my style of pouring and creating recipes. The other one might still be in contention for future comps.
3 drippers, no backup I’m gonna take care of them dw.
I don’t think your choice of dripper kills or saves your routine but it just always has to be one that suits your approach to brewing and delivers consistent results with it! It is necessary to pick one but people have been doing incredibly well with the obvious choices year after year.
Perfectly controllable, purchasable even. Get the right dripper for you and it’s going to do what you want it to.
Date of final decision: 2 months and 1 week before comp.
Filter Papers:
overrated decision but actually very important that it perfectly pairs with your dripper and style of brewing. Since there was not a range of well documented options and information on their pros and cons, I did a little bit of testing for my dripper. Once it worked perfectly fine that was really not my priority to spend more of my limited mental resources on.
They come in “big” packs ofc so I had 3 packs of 100, 1 each of the 3 papers I actually considered for the weekend (1 for Open, 1 for Compulsory, 1 for brew bar). have a lot left obvi.
Necessity: make a decision. If you already know what works, fine.
The controllability is not 100% compared to other purchased equipment. You need to be careful about placing, consistent rinsing, folding if necessary. Again, if it’s not broken (= you know that it works perfectly), don’t fix it.
Date of final decision: 2 weeks before comp.
Compulsory Service brewer:
(Compulsory service is where you get a random washed coffee and have to get the best out of it in a short amount of time.)
I’d encourage trying a number of very different brewers and recipes but for me it was necessary to settle on one early on that gives me all the confidence in the world to control my extraction during compulsory service. I busted a bunch of Aeropress brews during trials and once I knew the brewer I went with would be suitable for ALL kinds of possible Compulsory coffees I wanted to focus on my specific skillset for this brewer.
Amount: 3.
Necessity: you can just use your open service brewer if there’s no huge cons.
Controllability: get the brewer that gives you the most controllability. Period.
Date of final decision: around 5 months before comp
Water:
this process is of course wildly depending on the process of finding your comp coffee. I started testing around February and this was one of the learning processes where I found it incredibly important to read, test and experiment to actually understand the variables before applying them. So when I received my actual Comp roast batch, there were a number of standard recipes and personal favorites I could test for, while also having a basic understanding of which variable I needed to adjust to do what.
The water I went with was modified and adjusted this way, ending up at a recipe that I had not figured out before with other coffees.
I think I went through 11 liters on the weekend. Maybe 20 in total.
Necessity: these days incredibly important but also if you hit the ceiling of what you can achieve with your current knowledge: trust your recipe.
Controllability: very satisfactory but not 100% because ad hoc testing and actual concentrations of filtered or demineralized waters that are remineralized are not expected to be perfectly consistent to the single ppm. (I’m unsure how much residue in very clean, wiped kettles that are being used repeatedly that weekend can affect concentrations.)
Date of final decision: 2 hours before open service.
Cups and servers:
I see limited impact of cups and carafes on your score among those that are overall suitable and favorable. Again, if you feel comfortable working with them and their overall geometry supports aroma and taste assessment, go for it. I developed custom handmade cups with a buddy of mine. Yes, unnecessarily expensive but I just wanted to put as much work as possible into understanding every part of my setup and routine. Prototypes were ready about four weeks before comp and the boring pink glaze was a pragmatic choice due to limited time.
I brought 4 cups and 3 servers. 4 cups just because Ifu made 8 anyways.
Necessity: you don’t need to obsess about this.
Controllability: at least putting a lot of though into this and into how you present your coffee for aroma assessment gives you the feeling of having more control over the impression it makes.
Date of final decision: 3 weeks and 3 days before comp
Pouring and recipe:
with the dripper I ended up using for Open, I had around five months to test and get to know each other. You should understand the geometry of your brewer very well because, I assume, your main goal in playing with pouring is manipulating flow and the coffee bed. My ODZ dripper led me to a very clear style of brewing that didn’t even allow the question to play with a wild spectrum of pouring styles. I worked on a few threepeatable recipes and the first one I tested on my comp coffee delivered amazing results, so I just stuck with its basic structure.
Next to the style of coffee you’re looking for and understanding water, understanding your brewer geometry and your pouring and recipes connected to it are the most important things to start working on early on I would argue. Even though I did not pour as accurately as I could’ve on stage, my overall recipe that came out of this work seems to have performed very well even with several weight targets slightly missed.
Pours: 4. Basic recipe: 1.
Necessity: understand this or you understand nothing about how you got to the cup you’re tasting.
Controllability: never 100% but if you’ve deeply understood your brewer and recipe, you will do well.
Date of final decision: 19 Days before Open Service, 17 days before comp
surprisingly
even if you figured out all of the important variables, in a Brewers’ Cup you - the brewer - remain the most important variable to control
Other crap that you don’t think about
Before competing in one of these performance championships, you probably wouldn’t assume how many actually important decisions one needs to make. Regular or platform shoes? Which kinda towel is the best for stage use? How and when are you grinding? How and when are you rinsing? When do you switch kettles? No home brewer or barista should ever obsess about recipes that are meant to give you enough time to not only do three of them side by side with intense accuracy, they should also give you 3 spare seconds at one point to switch to another kettle.
I also called shots on when to wash and do my hair, stage clothes, scales, drip cups, socks, which glasses to wear on stage, whether or not to sift out chaff and you need to find routines to efficiently test different variables at home simulating stage conditions, how to cup and describe coffees for BrC, how to assess coffees during Compulsory practice time, how to memorize your speach and so on.
Biggest Struggles, Bigger Puzzles
This is mainly about challenges I wouldn’t have expected before starting this madness. First of all, I thought more renowned roasters had the capacity to work on such projects. I thought that my place of work was different because we don’t ever focus on marketing, let alone to international customers. I figured out rather quickly that almost all roasters would like to work with you but are not able or capable to. Almost every roaster is understaffed and some of them put a lot into international marketing but don’t have the capacities to follow up on it.
Then I wanted to work with someone that I know closely and that would have the capacity to work on this together. This roaster put in a lot of effort but in the end we could not find a coffee that was available to us. For example, buying 50$+/kg coffees in 20-30kg boxes would be absurd if there’s no chance he could’ve sold the rest of this box to customers for an appropriate price. I would like to work with this great coffee friend in the future but I will approach him much earlier next time!
The amount of work you need to put in come competition weekend. Because there’s so much you can’t control and fix ahead of time. Preparation can and did heavily facilitate the work of finetuning your coffee in terms of manipulating ageing/degassing, water recipes and pouring patterns. But it will probably be just as much work on day 2 and day 1 before open service next time.
Processing comp weekend. This might not be the case for all nationals, but when Austrian SCA Comps end on Sunday afternoon almost everyone is tired af and wants to go home early. Most of the judges, volunteers and competitors are employees or entrepreneurs that have to get back to work Monday morning. So 90% of people leave and the ones that are still in town Sunday night gather for a very exhausted dinner.
There was no party. Well, there was a party but it was Saturday night and everybody still in competitions went home early. You’re left with a thousand thoughts and at least one or two huge emotions that don’t just fade away on your way back home. If you don’t throw a party for yourself, as champions sometimes do, noone else will and everybody is so busy with their respective jobs that you’re just kind of left to deal with it all by yourself. There is an end to comp season, a quite abrupt one, but there was no finale.
Interconnection for a Complex Cup
The roaster that could’ve been, Boki the Machine an ex-coworker of mine, encouraged me to pursue this endeavor. Even before that talk on Dec 15 2023, next to one other coworker it was Boki that inspired me to improve my skills, believe in my ability to create the working environment I wanted to grow and learn and to share skills and knowledge to achieve that. So two years after I started working in specialty coffee to the day, I asked Boki whether he believed doing BrC would be right for me. And he believed. And so did I.
The big number of skilled coworkers that bring different angles, experiences and personal and professional preferences to the cupping table sure helped me to “intersubjectivize” my gained knowledge and skills. Daria and Rojda assessed and evaluated gross early Compulsory tests. Both mostly responded to me with professionally worded, personal opinions when bothered. Sebastian and Philipp also helped me develop a more objective understanding than ever of how any group of trained professionals experience different coffees.
Tobi was there when my last minute comp coffee samples arrived so he cupped them with me and we agreed on number 3.
Kathi who prepared her first ever attempt at BrC along with me all year offered a constant source of inspiration to rethink and evaluate my own choices in approaching this big challenge.
Also outside of Kaffeefabrik: I learned a lot about BrC and about individual aspects of competing from Paulina, Luisa, Boki and my roaster all of which helped me immensely to eventually present a routine I was 100% confident in and satisfied with.
My roaster Ivica did not only provide me with a perfect coffee at a last minute do or die moment. In contrast to the number of less renowned and personally as well as geographically closer roasters that I had contacted from March through June, Ivica and everyone else I was in contact with at Coffea Circulor put even more time and effort into helping me do my best than I could’ve asked for. Ivica even had the commitment to deliver more infos and recommendations than I had ever asked for. Although I did not follow every little bit of it to stick to my trusted corner stones, this further dedication and believe surely boosted my confidence in the coffee and me being its suitable brewer.
Throughout the year more companies and entrepreneurs showed their trust via sponsorship or support than I would’ve expected for a no-name like me. Read more about this in my financial report.
Resources, yes we need to talk about it
Mental:
I would recommend to make it an unnegotiable rule to not have any other huge mental tasks on your table when you commit to compete. In future attempts I should and will pull out if other big things come up that occupy my mind. This year I gladly only had one huge project, doing text and pictures for my work’s new website, spanning across months parallel to my competition project. I did not have any other major social, health related or work related issues that needed my continuous focus outside of living my day to day life and doing my day to day work.
Especially with about a month left to go and issues like getting all the equipment together (incl. trays, towels, an apron) and decisions on coffee/roast, water, recipe being imminent and then going into high intensity training of both compulsory and my Open routine. The mental strain became really unavoidable. Little getaways and a ten day vacation worked wonders. I know in such situations I need to keep myself in this tight overarching focus only seeking temporary relief. This will however increase the need of recovery after.
Nobody seemed fit and emotionally balanced and mentally rested come Open Service day.
Physical:
honestly, not as stressful as I would’ve expected. Physically the workload even in the intense two weeks leading up to Comp Weekend was quite bearable. Only a pattern of losing sleep due to overcaffeinating became increasingly obvious and painful around the weekend. My sleep has not improved very quickly after, but this is really the only single physical strain I can think of.
I went into this knowing my taste never 100% recovered from a covid infection in early 2023. It seems though as if I have been able to train my sensory skills so well that I am now able to better evaluate coffees and brews than ever before.
Social:
this is the hardest to bear, the most painful to accept. I spent way more time than I would’ve loved to around coffee events this year. I always found people that made it bearable (Daria, Emma, Paulina, Boki, Tobi, Nina, Al etc). But I would’ve loved to put this social energy elsewhere and I do not appreciate that so many of my socially most memorable moments are linked to work this year. It will take a few weeks to lose this feeling and to feel my emotional homebase shifting away from coffee people again.
Financial:
While having little to no reputation outside of the business I work for, I was in a very privileged situation being able to bear more of the financial burden personally compared to other baristas. Doing your first big comp is crazy expensive! Be aware!
I’ve tried to mention the areas were I could’ve saved significant sums if I would’ve spent less in my “testing and scouting” phase. You don’t need to buy and try a lot of different brewers, coffees and you can compete with less expensive cups that are regularly available for purchase.
So let’s lay it down:
I have spent at least 1267.76 Euros on things that were directly involved in my Open Service routine, it’s preparation and my Compulsory Service. This includes my brewers, my comp coffee, the custom handmade cups, essential equipment such as one scale, water and high end paper filters as well as other equipment and accessories such as towels, jars, utensils and the materials for the large serving tray I crafted. (Note that a lot of the equipment I used on stage was gifted, lent or bought second hand though!)
“Prototypes were ready about four weeks before comp and the boring pink glaze was a pragmatic choice due to limited time.”
not necessary but fun and insightful:
designing custom cups with Ifu based on learnings from wineglasses
I spent a minimum of 1104.35 Euros for stuff that was not part of my routine but I wouldn’t have otherwise spent this money. All of these I felt were necessary steps at the time: I estimate at least 300 Euros on coffees I got to assess the “competition coffee” sector. I spent more than 250 Euros on brewers I didn’t end up using, a relevant sum of ~85 Euros was “wasted” on disappointing filter papers as well.
A big chunk of cash went towards the comp weekend apartment that offered a dishwasher and space to escape the socially draining competition setting. I don’t regret any of it but I do believe – and others have proved this – that you can do successful comp campaigns for less. I wanted to see it all and get to know it all and that’s the price I paid. At this point I also think it is necessary to state that whoever is talking to you about sustainability from a competition stage is a hypocrite. Ok, I totally believe that it is an important value to most coffee professionals.
But I think we gotta be honest that competitions by design are about egos, excellence, showcasing YOUR (and your global north network’s) ideas and abilities. They can be done in more or less expensive, more or less sustainable ways but competing is in the first place a testament to your access to resources and spaces and the fact, that you’re not prioritizing sustainability. There is no evidence to suggest you can make up for any of that with impact at origin or the wider coffee value stream with what you say and do on stage. Let’s be real about that.
Ok. Rant done. I received gifts and support in the excess of 1000 Euros market value. This is a significantly higher amount than what I would’ve expected going into this year. To some extent I expect coffee related businesses to support their own employees. And my employer rightfully did so. I did not however believe that roasters, equipment producers and retailers would have any interest in supporting my competition attempt without scrutinizing my abilities. I hope it paid off for them. It sure did for me! 😊
“In future attempts I should and will pull out if other big things come up that occupy my mind.”
and since I already have a stack of pretty fun plans piled up, waiting for me to commit to them in 2025 you probably won’t see me compete next year. outside of CTC ofc. :)