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