toma wrote:Are signature drinks necessary in competitions? I guess the idea is that it makes it is easier to sell the competition to the public or the inclusion of the sig drink makes the barista look more creative. But what I'm interested in and of what I can learn a lot is this: who makes the best espresso/cappa and how. I find sig drinks boring. Am I the only one?

I think the baristas would be a lot less interested in competing if there were no signature drink.

The top competitors tend to bring more and more advanced culinary skills to their preparation, even though such high tech efforts are not directly rewarded (at most, they're worth a few points in the originality and appearance sections). So why do they do this?

I think there is a fairly direct path from coming up with killer specialty drinks to learning more about the culinary contexts of coffee making. The cash value of such skills is hard to assess, but I think they do a lot to develop the overall taste of the barista. Taste is what distinguishes a great chef from a merely skillful one; and my guess is that the same applies for coffee people. The best competing baristas are smart and ambitious, so they know the long run payoff of using the specialty drink to develop these skills. They might go somewhere else if the specialty drink weren't part of the competition; and the competition would lose a good deal of its sparkle as a result.