Petite Pour

Hi folks,

This past labor day weekend Steve from Press Coffee along with Brian from Cartel Coffee Lab held an excellent latte competition at Phoenix Cooks, a valley wide culinary conference. I was preparing for this competition (see prior post here) this week but in the end the machine I was practicing on and the machine we used in the competition were so different that it didn’t really help much. We actually ended up lending our La Marzocco GS3 for the competition that we will be using for our coffee catering business which will be launching in two weeks. Fortunately, we were able to install a new steam wand before competition which helped with the extra steaming load on Saturday.

The competition was a straight head-to-head competition, single elimination bracket tournament. They were judged by the typical criteria of symmetry and aesthetics but they also included taste as a category as well which I haven’t seen before in other competitions. I think next year they should skip the taste criteria since it would be nice to hand out the lattes to people watching the competition as well as preventing the complications of the judges drinking all that milk . I was going to post each head-to-head match but instead I’ll just show some of my favorites and you can browse all the latte art in the gallery below. In the end, I think the best baristas met at the finals, Ashley from Cartel and Greg an independant. Ashley ended up taking the win but it was a very close competition overall.

Here were my 3 favorites:

Arielle, Round 1, Press Coffee

Ashley, Round 2, Cartel Coffee Lab

Greg, Round 2, Independant

As for myself, I think the competition was fun which is the most salient aspect of any latte art competition. I am the first to admit I’m not the greatest “latte artist” but I’m more than happy to continue to improve my skill in every cappucino and latte I make for my customers.

*Btw, I don’t have any pictures of my latte art because I was making them so I couldn’t really take pictures of them but nothing too remarkable.

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