Behind the top-scoring performance of Michael Phillips in finals of the 2010 World Barista Championship, held on the 25th of June at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre, was a single idea: how can the processing of coffee beans influence a barista’s calibrations?

That may at first seem a snore of a technical question unlikely to electrify the spectator stands. Indeed it was the efficiency and flair of this fluid barista from Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago – and possibly also his white suspenders – that rocked the Olympia’s great steel and glass ceiling, not dry tales of wet processing. But with his bean-splitting challenge, Phillips was taking the most fundamental responsibility of a barista – brewing and serving a coffee to its best advantage – to a new level. And the judges, sadly the only ones in the arena who got to sample the espressos, cappuccinos and signature espresso drinks prepared in competition, were sufficiently impressed to award the USA its first World Barista Champion.

For his signature drink or, in his case, three signature drinks, Phillips chose three coffees from one terroir, the Coope Dopa Cooperative in Santa María de Dota, Tarrazú, Costa Rica. Same altitude, same microclimate, same bean varietals. The lone distinction? How three different farmers from a single cooperative chose to process these beans and how this in turn dictated subtle differences in the ways Phillips chose to roast, grind and dose them for espresso.

Three customised espressos inspired three exotic signature recipes, requiring Phillips to prepare an astonishing total of 12 glasses (three drinks for each of the tasting judges) in a short time frame. A daunting task to be sure, especially as the high level of difficulty in his program up to that point had already been lost on many in attendance, myself included. To grind the three coffees to their optimal fineness and therefore extraction, Phillips found himself one grinder short.

“He had to think outside the box”, barista Tim Styles of London’s Penny University explained to me. “He only had two grinders. So what did he do? He brought in an extra hopper.”

After his presentation in the finals I asked Phillips if he found it stressful to change grinder hoppers midway through a pressure-packed presentation performed while three technical judges poked their heads and clipboards in his tight workspace.

“Piece of cake”, responded Phillips, less with swagger than levity. Thing is it was a big deal. From close in I could see his hands trembling as he poured liquids into glasses. I could almost feel his exhales of relief when his time was up and attention turned to the Greek finalist Stefanos Domatiotis.

Changing coffees. Switching hoppers. Altering grinds. Adjusting doses. “Was all that necessary”?, I asked Phillips, minutes before the results were announced . “If that didn’t need to be done”, he reasoned “then they wouldn’t need me to do it”.

Spoken like a true barista.
podium (l to r): Scottie Callaghan, Australia, 3rd
Michael Phillips, USA, 1st
Raul Rodas, Guatemala, 2nd

One year on, those conditions have been met and the wishes of the growing legion of local cafenatics has been granted: London’s great coffee moment has come.

First, London’s best baristas are successfully weaning coffee-diluting delusionists off their morning bowls of warm milk to richer espresso drinks in progressively darker shades of brown. The 4-step programme advances from latte to flat white to cortado (aka gibraltar) to macchiato to espresso. The national chains have taken notice. Costa launched a flat white in January with great fanfare, not so much by improving the quality of its coffee, predictably, but rather through a campaign of hype: The search for the perfect coffee will soon be over with the arrival of the Flat White to Costa.

Secondly, the number of great London coffee shops which roast their own beans has increased by 50 percent. Nude Espresso has joined Monmouth Coffee and Climpson & Sons in this select group. Others tempted to do the same should by inspired by the recent opening of Caravan, the first restaurant in the UK to roast its own coffee.

Thirdly, filter coffee is at last a brewing trend. Tapped & Packed, a superb new coffee shop and espresso bar in Fitzrovia, Central London, showcases 3 of the best methods for preparing filter coffee – Aeropress, pour over (cone filter) and the attention-grabbing siphon, a two-chambered vacuum coffee pot that resembles some glass apparatus in a mad scientist’s lab. The new location of Taylor St Baristas in the City of London adds a 4th method, French press (cafetière). Even Gwilym Davies, a Londoner whose espresso-making skills won him the World Barista Championship, is brewing lowtech coffees through either an Aeropress or a pour-over cone.

Beyond these developments is the coffee buzz I am both feeling on the streets of East London and Soho and seeing overseas. In London you see new indie coffee shops opening all the time. In New York or Los Angeles you might spot the dragon logo for the influential London roaster Square Mile either on the company’s stickers or, sometimes, a bag of its beans acquired through transatlantic trades. (Baristas don’t exchange shirts, as footballers do. They swap coffee beans.) Tell an American coffee geek you’re from London and he or she will ask you if you’ve ever had a coffee made by Gwilym, whose reign lasts another two months. He’ll part with his title in June at the 2010 World Barista Championship, to be held in that great new coffee capital, London.

Why has it been so difficult to pinpoint his whereabouts? For years now, Gwilym has not plied his craft in a coffee shop with a fixed address and fitted plumbing. That would be too restrictive for a free-spirit who lives in a houseboat. He developed his championship form working irregular hours at a freestanding cart parked at Whitecross Street food market (“Pitch 42”) on weekdays from 8ish to 2ish and behind the Columbia Road flower market on Sundays at roughly the same hours. His schedule was made more uncertain by his winning the World Barista Championship (WBC) in April 2009. A rock star in the coffee world, he’s invited to Italy so often he may have to change his name to Guglielmo. And now he’s rolled into Shoreditch with yet another cart. Prufrock, as the sleek and polished trolley is known but not labeled, is positioned inside the fashionable menswear shop Present (140 Shoreditch High Steet – see map).

With the cart at Present Gwiylm has rolled out the prized Nuova Simonelli piston espresso machine he won at the WBC. Piston espresso machines, unlike most pump-driven ones, are fitted with manual levers that need to be pulled down by the barista to build pressure and force hot water through the coffee grinds. The term “pulling” an espresso derives from this action.

The espressos, lattes and cappuccinos prepared with a piston machine are not necessary superior to those made with a pump machine. In fact, because these manual machines are so difficult to operate the results are often disappointing. Struggling to get his espresso and steamed milk the way he wanted and hoping to learn from his missteps Gwilym recorded all the variables of his failed attempts – dry weight, total time, liquid weight, etc – on a hand-written chart. This proved counterproductive. He is a coffee geek, sure enough, but not a charts and numbers coffee geek. “Stop thinking so hard,” advised his roaster, Annette Moldvaer of London’s Square Mile Coffee. “Just make a nice coffee.”

He listened and he did. Not every espresso is the same. One can be heavy and chocolatey; the next, lighter and fruitier. But it is this very mutability that I find most appealing. Whereas competition baristas like Gwilym are judged for the consistency of their drinks and presentation, at Present he and the star baristas who operate the Nuova Simonelli in his absence are embracing an inconsistency and imperfection dictated by a fiddly manual machine. Every result is a discovery; every cup, unique. The ultimate reward for Gwilym is found in the quiet of the piston machine. There is no electric pump making noise. For the first time he can hear his world champion espresso fall into the cup. At Present, you can hear it, too.

Gwilym does not work at a coffee shop. He developed his championship form at a freestanding cart parked at the Whitecross Street food market (in front of yellow building at 149 Whitecross St – map) on weekdays from 8am to 2pm and behind the Columbia Road flower market (inside small flea market at 7B Ezra Street – see map) at the same time on Sundays. When he’s home in London, that’s where you are most likely to find him, except when he’s at Present, a fashionable menswear shop in Shoreditch (140 Shoreditch High Steet – see map). He’s parked a sleek white trolley to the left as you enter.

Though Gwilym is cannot always be presents to call the shots you are sure to find a very capable and sometimes accomplished barista pulling them. On Sundays you will often see Gwilym’s roaster,  Square Mile Coffee‘s James Hoffmann, who also happens to be the 2007 World Barista Champion, pulling shots and texturing milk.

When the new champion returned to London from the World Barista Championship I first caught up with him at Caffè Culture, a coffee trade show at London’s Olympia exhibition centre. I found him preparing coffees and holding court at the stand for Nuova Simonelli espresso machines. He seemed to be enjoying his newfound rock-star status.

In front of his fawning audience I reminded him that a few days before departing for the WBC in Atlanta he had confided that he hadn’t had much time to train and seemed to suggest that his goal was not to embarrass himself. The champ blushed.

So how, I asked, did he end up winning?

Like the Beatles in Hamburg, Gwilym perfected his act through raw performances under difficult conditions, preparing street coffees by the thousands in London. His game plan was to concentrate on making the best possible espresso and cappuccino, forgo points on presentation and not worry much about technical grading.

“I wasn’t polished,” he says, an understatement given that he had to repull a set of espressos in the WBC finals. “I ignored the technical judges. I just did what I do every day.”