It’s easy enough to pull up to a local café’s drive-thru, or make your morning beeline to the coffee counter to get your fix… but there’s something which you might never have considered before – who is it that makes that coffee for you each morning? How come your triple mocha soy latte (no whip!) tastes like heaven each and every time you take that first sip – so much so, in fact, that you’ve come to simply take its perfection for granted? It’s likely because you’re supposed to feel this way – that’s part of the café charm! However, no one can run a successful coffee shop without the people behind the counter, who are responsible for actually making your drink. They’re more than café employees – they’re baristas.

What is a Barista?

In essence, a barista is someone who doesn’t just make coffee – instead, to them, coffee making is an art. It’s easy enough for any coffee stand to simply label their employees as ‘baristas’, but in order to truly wear the title, it takes more than several part-time shifts and a paycheck. Becoming a barista requires training, expert precision, and a professional but creative attitude toward making the perfect coffee. For most establishments, training an employee to become a barista is an investment – barista training can take anywhere from several highly intense days, to a week or more of training in both a practice mode and real-world testing. The idea is that a beginner must first learn how to make a perfect espresso each and every time, as well as how to recognize the right blend and proper machine maintenance, before progressing to specialty drinks.

What Does a Barista Do?

Aside from making the perfect espresso, a barista in training has a number of additional obligations before he or she can make the leap from ‘trainee’ to ‘professional coffee artist’. In any barista training course, beginners will learn everything from: - Where coffee comes from: cultivation and production - Why fresh coffee makes a difference - How to properly steam milk - How to use all the barista’s art tools - Cleaning and maintenance of all the barista’s art tools - The difference between a ristretto, caffe latte, cappuccino, etc. Once the beginning barista has learned how to make the perfect basic drink and how to maintain all the associated tools that are used, all the other recipes will fall into place – and as these are memorized, the barista will often become proficient at remembering multiple coffee orders! In fact, an experienced barista can often serve up to five customers at once – they’re just that good at what they do.

What Makes it Art?

Not everyone is cut out to be a professional barista – learning to make the perfect cup requires an intense amount of patience, concentration, and dedication to getting things right. It may take up to ten tries before the beginner pulls his or her best shot – the resistance against pressured water must be perfectly even, which depends on three additional factors: the ideal tamp, dose, and grind. Knowing what’s considered ‘perfect’ is easy enough: it will have a rich, dark hazelnut colored crema on top! And once it is made, steamed milk or sugar can be added to create specific specialty drinks. The difficulty in creating the delicious brew in the first place is where the notion of ‘art’ comes to play, but that’s not the only challenge – remembering and creating all those recipes you see on the café menu are part of the barista’s repertoire as well. And once the barista has mastered the drinks on the menu? That’s where he or she can become free to experiment with interesting techniques of coffee creation, like making latte art – where your coffee is actually presented to you with a picture on top!

Author credits

Andreanne Hamel is passionate about sharing information on her website regarding Italian stove top espresso makers, reviews of espresso machines, and a special chart giving the range for a superautomatic espresso machine price, for example.