by Ken Fox on Thu Oct 12, 2006 5:24 am I agree with the point that Marshall makes, where he distinguishes between someone working as a barista for someone else, making drinks, and someone who goes on to be an entrepreneur in coffee. I guess you could call both of these people "baristas," but I'd call the latter person a cafe owner, a roaster, or something else, even if he or she occasionally makes drinks for customers or serves as barista trainer for the staff. I would disagree a little with Marshall in the implication that the world is your oyster if you are the "second sort of barista," because it's a tough world out there and for every Doug Zell there are probably 10 people who try to work in the business and either fail or just eke by, making less than they could if they were employed by someone else in a more mainstream type of job.
As to Dank Bean's comments, there are quite a few and I'm not sure where to start nor do I have time to address all of them
One of the points I tried to make much earlier in the thread was that there is a distinction between home users, no matter how enthusiastic, and people who make their living off of coffee. Our interests coincide quite a bit however we need to be careful to realize that our interests are not always in agreement. My own particular interests, which have included major hack jobs on my own espresso machines, and home roasting with a sample roaster shoehorned into a garage, don't necessarily have much to interest the businesspeople among us, either. As home users/enthusiasts, we do need to be careful to temper our enthusiasm for what pros do, because, as I said, we risk losing our independence and becoming de facto "shills" for the industry. This site is named "Home-Barista.com" and not something else and I think it is named that way for a reason.
To the extent that cafe owner is serving as mentor to his baristas, one has to consider what is best for those employees in the long run. On the one hand, you want to have them around as they are good workers and the ones that succeed in competitions can train others and perhaps be an advertising draw to the business. On the other hand, it might be more in the interest of the barista that he or she move on to some other type of career that could produce a much greater income and better lifestyle. For example, if one had a barista who came from an underprivileged background and who won a barista competition, maybe the cafe owner (if he wanted to really be a mentor) would tell this young person something to the effect of, "gosh, you really CAN do ANYTHING! Have you considered applying to medical or graduate school?" I'd think that listing that one was a champion barista on a CV would help someone get into a good graduate school; if nothing else it shows the person can do more than one thing and that he or she has a history of success.
Like everyone else here, I wish the true professionals the best, and I enjoy visiting their cafes. I just wish that these competitions would be more geared to improving the main midsection of cafes out there rather than more of less being a competition between the top spots that confines its benefits mostly to the top 2% of cafes out there, the ones that are already good.
ken
