"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

It isn’t every day that someone from within your ranks rises to the top of their field and gets to represent Australian at an international championship. Whatever the result, it was always going to be a proud moment for all of us at Five Senses.

First, some quick background…

There are essentially three major international competitions on the coffee calendar each year:

• The World Barista Championship (aka WBC);
• The World Latte Art Championship; and
• The World Cup Tasters Championship.

Preceding each world event, a series of competitions are held within each country to determine who will be named as the country’s representative. I’m sure you’ll have read some of my previous articles about how we’ve fared in these competitions. To date, Five Senses employs four people who have won the state championship and gone on to represent at the nationals in both the Barista Championship and Latte Art Championship. In fact, the number of people on staff who have achieved at this high level is almost freaky!

Some of the State Barista Champions that we’re lucky enough to have working here include Mark, Jenny, Ian and Jeremy; and then there’s Kimbo, who won the WA Latte Art Championship, and Ben, who is the current Australian Cupping Champion.

It was this last victory at the National Cupping Championship that heralded the entry of the first Five Senses person onto the world stage. Enter stage left Ben Bicknell (cue loud applause).

The rules of the competition are simple. Each competitor is given 8 sets of 3 cups of coffee. In each of these 8 sets, two of the coffees are the same and one is different. In other words, the competitor has to identify the odd coffee out in each set. As the competition progresses, the differences between the coffees become smaller and smaller, making it more and more difficult to determine which is the odd one out. The competitors are given a maximum of 8 minutes to make their choices, and when competitors get the same number correct as other competitors, each competitor is ranked in order of how quickly they finished. For example, if 6 of the 30 competitors get 8 out of 8, they are then ranked by the time that they took to finish.

In Australia, most competitors employ an MO based on speed, and accordingly, this is how Ben trained. In his practice sessions, Ben was completing his selection in less than two minutes, typically getting seven or eight correct. As it turns out, if he’d managed to pull this out on Sunday and score eight, he most certainly would have been the World Champ.

Unfortunately, it appears that nerves got the better of him. Ben pulled out a time of 1:52, with 5 correct out of 8. We were both interested to see that strategically, in the early rounds, many of the competitors used nearly all of their 8 minutes to ensure that they scored at least 7 out of 8. We’re certain that if Ben had employed this strategy, he would most definitely have made it into the last round of 4. There were 34 countries competing. Unfortunately, his score of 5 out of 8 was too low to get him through to the finals. The next fastest completion time of any competitor was about 4 minutes, meaning that Ben was more than twice as quick as the next fastest competitor.

As it turned out, the Russian competitor, Valentina Kazachkova, won the title of World Champ. In the preliminary rounds she used almost all of her 8 minutes to achieve her 8 correct sets. In the final round, her time was still longer than the other three competitors, who got 7 out of 8 within around 3 to 4 minutes. Unfortunately for them, despite her very slow time, around 6 minutes, Valentina nailed 8 out of 8 to take the title home to Russia.

We’ve taken a lot away from this competition. We know that way they ‘play the game’ at the international level is very different to the way it is done in Australia, and that we need to adapt our game plan next time. We also know that we can mix it with the best in the world. Ben was middle of the field in the end and could quite possibly have been amongst the top few had our game plan been different.

To Ben we say ‘well done’ and to the rest of the world we say ‘look out – here he comes!’.