A Coach's Diary: Brewers Cup in under 14 days

Coaching for the Brewers Cup

Recently, I had the pleasure of coaching Jojo, a remarkable barista from Special Guests, as she prepared for her very first Brewers Cup competition. In this post, I'm excited to share some insights into the coaching techniques I implemented to help her shine during this competitive journey.

Preparation is Key!

For those who aren't familiar with the Brewers Cup competition format, the competitor needs to deliver a 10 minute presentation, serving 3 sensory judges, 1 filter coffee each, brewed individually for each judge, whilst being also scored on the technical abilities, as well.

Which means that in under 14 days, we need to have a coffee (or coffee blend) fully dialled in to perfection, nailing the roast, the recipe, the brewing water, the brewing device, the brewing technique and most importantly the flavours! Sounds quite reasonable, right?

Well, in most cases, baristas who are competing in brewers cup competition have between 2 and 6 months to prepare for such a competition, depending on the ''competition body'' (the country you are competing in) but this time, in the UK, due to some circumstances, the competitors had a maximum of 2 weeks to prepare.

''If you fail to plan, you plan to fail''

This is where having a coach is paramount. I had a lot of conversations with other competitors (as a past competitor myself) and they said that in the beginning of your competition journey, you don't need a coach. My answer to them was ''In history, all great mentors had mentors, and all great coaches had coaches. What a coach can do for you is ''compress decades into days'', which will prevent you not only from doing unnecessary mistakes but most importantly from showing you only the things that work rather than experimenting with things that ultimately won't work''.

The need for the Ultimate Plan

With only 14 days to go, and Jojo, the competitor, working full time as a barista, finishing around 5pm every day, every day had to count!

Under regular circumstances, the way that the competition coaching works is that the competitor comes up with the concept, writes a script, dials in the coffee, the recipe, brewing water etc and goes to the coach for guidance, direction and to correct some potential mistakes. I do agree personally with that approach, because this is the only approach in which the competitor will go on stage and truly present their work. Because this would be work that they have done themselves, research that they've done themselves, rather than getting everything done by someone else, that a lot of people do. It is common in our industry to see routines & concepts being copied all the time. And as a seasoned coffee competition coach myself, I can see it in the competitor's eyes, if they truly believe in what they say during their performance.

Where to focus first?

A question that needs a clear answer from the beginning. Only then you will be able to make the most of your preparation! And I see it all the time, with competitors focusing on all sorts of stuff and more often than not, they focus on the things that don't really matter that much. In our case, I see a lot of competitors, who are truly passionate about brewing filter coffee, spend countless hours trying new brewing devices and all sorts of paper filters, when they haven't even got a basic script or a concept in place.

Vag's Brewers Cup Coaching Blueprint

There are many different coaches and each one with their own coaching style. Some styles work better than others. For example, as we said earlier on, some coaches prefer to give the competitor everything ready, concept, script, brewing technique etc so the competitor can focus on the performance and some others they let the competitor do everything on their own, offering them guidance and support in the questions that the competitor has. I've seen both work but I've also seen both fail. As a past competitor myself, I've had coaches that had used all these different coaching protocols on me, therefore I told myself ''when I will coach competitors, I will have to create my own coaching Blueprint''

Part 2 is coming soon :)

#Brew #Transform #Impact