Crema De La Crema – An Espresso Coffee Blog in Singapore

I was formerly a barista trainer at The Line Restaurant at Shangri-la Hotel. I quit rather than having to compromise on quality issues. Now, I’m a barista trainee at Oriole Coffee. Does this bother me? Let me elaborate ….

My work day starts at 7.00 am. I open up the Republic Plaza outlet of Oriole Coffee Espresso and Brew Bar together with my colleagues. I get to calibrate coffee that is roasted the week before by a chap who was the Singapore National Barista Champion 2 years running. Never mind the machine I’m pulling espresso on, named by Gizmodo as the barista’s wet dream machine, the La Marzocco Strada EP, the first of its kind in Asia, and the equally stupendous beauty of a grinder, the Mazzer Robur. I get to calibrate espresso on 1 of the 2 supplied naked portafilters. I record tasting notes of the daily brew, having written down words like “sandalwood”, “granny smith apples”, and “blueberries”. I juggle between pulling shots from each of the 3 PID’d groupheads, maintaining a consistent syrupy mousetail pour, taking turns dosing up to 3 portafilters or hopefully making brilliantly foamed milk the likes of glossy white paint, hopefully delighting customers and myself when I should draw a decent looking rosetta leaf or heart, my trainer all the while stressing the importance of the taste of the milk based drink rather than the art, and should anything go wrong with the pour from the use of experimental VST baskets designed with cutting edge technology I’ve only previously read about from coffee newsgroups, then the …. get this, the R & D team made up of not 1, but 2 Singapore National Barista Champions pay us a visit with their bag full of intricate equipment not limiting to syringes, refractometer, a coffee metering iPhone app that can’t be found on the App Store. They spew forth terms like Total Dissolved Solids, Solubles Concentration, Extraction Yields, and take numerous readings using eye-droppers full of coffee, all the while punching in numbers into their iPhones. End of the day, they do make a difference. And the customers. They KNOW and appreciate the effort. My colleagues? They talk more coffee than I do, and make drinks as if they were going about their routines during the barista championships.

Do I mind being a barista trainee at Oriole Coffee? Are you kidding?

Naked pour from a La Marzocco Strada

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 11:52 pm and is filed under barista, Cafe, championship, espresso, oriole, oriole-coffee-roasters, singapore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.