What is your earliest coffee related experience? My mothers Austrian Coffee Cake – it’s was steeped in Dark Italian roast filter coffee and booze and had oodles of cream and sugar. I thought it was great.
When did you first get working in coffee? My mother’s cafe in Wellington. We were supplied by Tony Gibbs of Belaroma. We used Belaroma’s signature blend Supreme. Belaroma would later be purchased by Chris Dillon and become Coffee Supreme.
What led you to becoming a barista? My mother’s cafe and then a little later the deli I worked at decided there was money to be made in coffee so put a machine in. A lever pull Pavoni. Chris Dillon from Coffee Supreme was our account manager. My colleague was Emma Markland Webster who used to put a swirl in every coffee using a dessert fork. My barista years continued as I needed to keep the cash coming in while I was at University. I just preferred it to waiting tables.
What is the best part of your job? Working with and for people I love. Taking the job but not ourselves seriously.
Talk us through a typical work day. Drop my son at school. Arrive at Prefab. Say good morning to staff and the clients I make eye contact with. Have my morning flat white at the bar and check out who’s in, how busy it is, suss out the situation. Then to the office where I juggle between phone calls, emails, online meetings and my different roles. The day always ends with a glass of bubbles.
What are your roles outside of making coffee? The only person I make coffee for these days is my partner Sven. The Rocket goes on every morning so that I can make him one double espresso. I make myself two single espressos.
I’m Development Manager for the NZSCA. I look after a myriad of activity there. I’m also a judge in barista championships. Plus sales and marketing for Acme and Co, a specialist espresso cup manufacturer and I do a whole lot of stuff for Acme’s other business Prefab like the publicity and marketing.
I also just created an amateur coffee competition for Atomic Coffee Roasters and The Rocket. And I’m finishing off the instruction manual for Rocket Espresso.
What is your favourite brew method and/or coffee origin and why? An almost impossible question. I crave so many different types of coffees and so many different brew methods. There’s a place for a medium roasted blend to go with milk. Then a super clean washed Kenyan via V60… One of my most memorable coffees was a clean full natural El Salvador that Craig Simon served at the 2012 Australian Barista Championship semi-final. I tasted it again the next day in his final performance but that extra day had given it that bit of wild funkiness. I loved it so much in its cleaner form. Stu Hargie also served me an amazing Yirgacheffe from Ninety Plus via Kalita – I could have drunk a litre of it.
Easier to say what I’m not keen on – Stovetop. But even then I’ve had some really enjoyable times with pre-ground coffee at a bach in the middle of nowhere where the water came out of a not too clean looking well and the only coffee maker was a dodgy looking stovetop.
Tulip or rosetta? Tulip. I can’t pour them. I’m rubbish at latte art.
What would be your dream ‘coffee experience’? Well, I’ve only been to origin once. Jimma, Ethiopia. We went to the exact spot that coffee was discovered. We also built houses for locals with Habitat for Humanity Ethiopia. The land had coffee trees all around and monkeys with white tails and we ate lunch on site every day and it was beautiful and so were the people. I don’t know how I will ever top that.
Do you have a ‘coffee crush’ ? I like so many people in coffee. Many coffee crushes!! Gosh that sounds PC!