Barista Training

If there is one thing an ever-changing world can demonstrate, it is that even the most commonplace jobs we do everyday on autopilot can often be improved upon. From the way we brush our teeth in the morning, to the way in which we prepare our bed for sleep at night, almost all our undertakings can be upgraded with a little extra know-how, a bit of modern technology or a new technique.

When it comes to food and drink, nothing - no single simple task - is as open to improvement quite as much as the act of making a cup of coffee.

Until this week I’d never have dreamed of saying such a thing. But that was before I joined a barista training class staged by one of the country’s leading organic coffee companies. Now, after my visit to Owen’s Coffee in Devon, I make the claim because I know a thousand percent more about making coffee than I did before my visit to the company’s state-of-the-art headquarters just off the A38 dual-carriageway near Ivybridge.

The new building, close to the well-known Endsleigh Garden Centre, includes an all-important roastery, but also features a training centre where anyone - from an amateur like me to professional caterers - can learn how to make a perfect cup of coffee.

I’ll put my (lack of) credentials on the table because I know quite a few people whose coffee habit more-or-less matches my own. I’m talking about the sort of person who loves good coffee, but who - for various reasons - limits their consumption to just one or two cups a day. The self-imposed rationing means they want that cuppa to be the very best it can be. 

Hesp is shown around the roastery at Owen's Coffee

I haven’t tasted instant coffee in decades - ever since I learned to use what’s known as a mocha-pot in Italy. And because of the connection, I have purchased the same brand of Italian ground coffee for the best part of 40 years. That regime came to an end this week. The mocha-pot will stay, but I’ll now buy Owens coffee and the way I go about preparing my daily shot will change.  

That’s partly because in recent times I’ve begun to find my coffee tasted a little bitter and astringent.  I realised the reasons why during my barista-training session - and learned how to make a more rounded and delicious cuppa that does not have any ashy, tarry, undertones. 

Owens’ head barista trainer, the informative and personable Jenny McDonough, took me through the procedure on the sort of £6,000 espresso machine you will see in good coffee shops. The underlying principles remain the same no matter which technique you are using, so it all comes down to the type of coffee you are using, how the beans have been roasted (and their all-important degree of freshness), the grind-quality, the tamping procedure, the bar pressure of hot water, the length of time the flow takes to pass through the coffee and the proper way to “stretch” (or aerate) the milk. 

Head barista Jenny McDonough

And, by the way, Owens like to use the sort of milk I know many readers prefer - by which I mean proper full fat cow’s milk produced in Cornwall by Trewithen Dairy. 

We do not have room to go through the entire procedure, but here is part of the process which I found particularly fascinating, because it shows just how fine an art proper coffee-making is. Having clamped a well tamped container of Owens Coffee into the machine, Jenny used three clear glasses so that she could demonstrate to us the very different flavours which the 20-second process of blasting hot water at nine-bar of pressure through the tamped coffee can produce. The first glass captured the first five second’s worth of flow and was light in colour compared to the next ten second delivery. Last came a third glass in which Jenny captured the final five second’s of flow.    

Using teaspoons we tasted all three - the first was not so flavoursome and just a little bit bitter, the second main shot was deep, nutty and fruity in flavour, and the third was highlighted by a noticeable bitterness. 

As Jenny told us, the combination of these three parts of the flow create the perfect espresso - a short strong form of coffee which requires complex layers of flavour. She also explained that the professional machines will make the classic “flat-white” (so popular nowadays) without the third part of the flow adding the deeper darker undertones. 

So much for the training session - if you love coffee I’d highly recommend booking a visit to Owens… 

But what of the company itself? How was it that a female scientist, and her husband who had a successful career in the tourism and leisure industry, changed tack to start roasting coffee beans?  

Lorraine and Tim Bridden were joined by their marketing manager Liz Orgill as we sat down over the inevitable cup of coffee for a chat. 

Tim and Lorraine Bridden of Owens Coffee

“Owens was set up in 2010 - we purchased the assets of a start up created by an American lady who lived in Modbury, which is where the name came from,” explained Lorraine, who began her working life as a microbiologist. “She did it because, being American, she was used to being able to get good coffee from a local roastery, and she couldn’t do that here. However, for various reasons she had to move back to America. I took over and started to roast.

“We started going to local markets and letting people taste the products and building a pool of customers. Then, in 2018, we were getting far too big and we developed this bespoke unit in Ivybridge, and moved over.” 

So why would a scientist suddenly want to become a coffee roaster? 

“It’s all about the process,” Lorraine replied. “I am quite structured in my approach and it is about making sure I get the right profiles developed to make a fantastic coffee and creating a consistent product. That is where the science comes in because you need processes, you need to be able to quality-control to make a consistent product. For example, if you can’t get hold of a certain origin of coffee beans, you need to be able to match from other origins to get the same flavour profile.” 

The business quickly flourished… “We were ahead of our time, especially in this region” Lorraine says. “Serious coffee-drinking was taking off in London and Bristol, but not really down here. And we’ve always roasted our own beans - we’ve done that from day one and built the business out of that - so we know our stuff.” 

Tim added: “We came into it being fairly naive. Like a lot of industries, when you start scratching the surface you realise there’s a lot more to it. One of the things we did not inherit was a good espresso coffee - and you need that to be able to go to the hospitality trade. Lorraine managed to produce a really good espresso - called Bantham.

“Most of it was self-taught,” smiled Lorraine. “I had some training, but really it was a case of learning myself first, then getting professionals to advise. That’s good because then you know what to ask. The importers of organic coffee helped us get the right product from the start. You are dealing with quality graders - people you put a lot of faith in. They’re the ones who go to farmers to make sure what we are getting home here is the right product.”

Tim explained: “The coffee we use comes from all over the world - then we produce a blend, which is a recipe effectively. Coffee beans are an agricultural product and vary from farm to farm, country to country, and they are influenced by the weather - so you need to get conformity throughout your range. To do that you need to be able to tweak and adjust the type of beans, and the way you are roasting them, to maintain that flavour. That is why our beans are coming from Africa, South America, Indonesia.” 

“It’s been a steep learning curve,” said Lorraine. “And we’ve always been organic. We were in Modbury, home of the ban on the plastic shopping bag - so it seemed like the right thing to do. It was about wanting a sustainable business from day one. It is our USP. 

“And we know Fair Trade is making a difference. The Fair Trade money goes into entire community structures and so on, which you can’t do on your own. 

“Added to that we know our product hasn’t travelled too far,” said Tim. “A lot of coffee travels around the world a couple of times before it reaches a cup. If we buy some coffee from a farm in Rwanda, we know it comes directly from that farm. We have a contact who is a refugee from Rwanda and he set up the whole thing with his family there. We know the people, and they are getting a very good price for their product. We think customers will increasingly want to buy coffee which has that kind of story.”

We later joined an online virtual coffee morning staged by Owens Coffee

“We are importing a raw product, so it’s not like wine which is made at origin,” added Lorraine, who explained the company had invested in one of the best coffee roasting machines on the market. “With coffee, the product is made only once it’s been roasted. When it’s in the raw form it can last in the right conditions for a year or more - but once it’s been roasted it’s fresh produce, so being aware of the roast date is very important.”

As for the trade customer base, Tim told me there’d been a proliferation of people wanting to open coffee shops in recent years. “We get about four or five calls a week from people who say they are planning to set up a coffee shop.” 

“We become part of their business,” explained Lorraine. “With coffee, you need to be trained - you need to understand the product and what it should taste like - so having that relationship is key. We get involved and become part of their business - so if they do well, we do well.”

Some of Owens’ excellent reputation came from the fact that the product was named the UK’s Best Organic Coffee a couple of years ago by the Soil Association. The company now also blends award winning teas and has seen its Devonshire Tea become hugely popular in recent years.

Owens Coffee HQ is open Monday to Saturday - you can pop in to buy a cup or a bag of coffee, or tea or book to attend one of the popular training sessions. 

Just be warned that if you do you might find yourself changing the way you’ve been making coffee for years - which in my case has turned out to be a very good thing indeed. 

This article first appeared in the Western Morning News