Viva Brighton Issue #28 June 2015

coffee
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Barista Training
One Church, ten students, great coffee
According to a recent survey from the University of
Stirling, Brighton residents drink more coffee than
anyone else in the country. Which has led to a proliferation
of independent specialty coffee shops in the
city: 20 in Trafalgar Street alone, at the last count.
The trouble is there aren’t enough trained baristas
around to work in them. Making a good cup of
coffee from a Gaggia-style machine is no easy task:
it requires a complex set of skills as sensitive adjustments
frequently need to be made, depending
on numerous variants concerning the provenance,
quality and age of the coffee. All this at top speed
in front of an often impatient queue.
“Some of these cafés have invested in the right
equipment,” says Ben Szobody, “but they’re serving
a bad cup of coffee as they don’t know how to use
it properly. So cafés are either poaching baristas
who have been trained up properly, or using staff
who don’t really know what they’re doing.”
Ben is project manager of One Church’s charity
wing. One Church is actually two combined
churches, one in Gloucester Place, the other in
Florence Road, Fiveways. The group have moved
all their religious ceremonies to the latter, freeing
up the North Laine space for community-friendly
activities, from food banks to winter homeless
sheltering. And barista training.
Ben realised that Brighton was “full of youngsters,
many from deprived areas, with nothing to put on
their CVs, so no way to get started. How depressing
is that?” He put two and two together, and
successfully applied to get grant funding (including
£15,000 from the European Social Fund) to
set up a barista apprenticeship course for 16-24
year-olds, with three hours’ practical training at
the church on a Monday (followed by English and
Maths classes delivered by academic partner PACA
in Portslade) then four days a week working on
placement for a café.
We’re talking in the church, at the Monday morning
class, where ten students are being trained up
by the enthusiastic Laura, who performs that role
the rest of the week at Small Batch. Experienced
barista ‘mentors’ Kat and Philippe are looking on,
too, as the students try out different combinations
of dosage and yield (how much coffee to use, and
how much water to put through it) on three different
state-of-the-art double-cup machines (supplied
through an ‘amazingly affordable deal’ by UCC
Coffee). There’s a concentrated buzz of happy
learning about proceedings, and the church starts
smelling better and better.
I chat to Laura and Philippe and Kat and a couple
of the students, one of whom brings me a cup of
espresso. It tastes great, though Ben, a much more
seasoned judge, has a sip and pronounces that it’s
got a bit of a dry finish. A work in progress, then,
but the course is far from over. I get the feeling
we’re in a win-win-win here: most students will
come out the other end, heads held high, job
secure, capable of making blindingly good brews
for the city’s growing population of coffee drinkers.
Alex Leith
New courses start Sept. ben@onechurchbrighton.org
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