The UK Barista championship 2008 is over and I’m very proud to say that my good friend Hugo Hercod beat of 23 others (including me) to win it. Hugo will go on to represent UK on Copenhagen this summer.

It’s no secret that Hugo and I have been training together for the competition, Hugo’s (and partner, Sarah) cafe Relish food and drink is only a 5 minute walk from my house and I spend a lot of time there!

I think Hugo is very deserving of the title, he works 70+ hour weeks in his cafe and spends most of that time infront of his machine, true dedication. Hugo used two blends, Origin triple certified Colombian, Honduran & Sumatran for his cappuccino and a Daterra, Yirgacheffe, El Salvador and Terrazu. His signature drink was based around Turkish delight.

The standard of competition in the semi-finals was very high. Despite lots of training I managed to completely mess up my presentation by failing to finish setting up. The 15 minutes allocated for setup flew by and I still had a pile of dry cloths, no trays laid up, no shots sent through the machine and coffee grounds all over the place. Not good. After that my presentation can only really be described as ‘frantic’. Time was always going to be tight given the work required for my signature drink but having an incomplete area probably wasted me about 50sec of faffing about doing things that should have been done before I started. As a result I not only ran over time by 24sec but served (almost tennis style) some pitiful signature drinks, what a shame, I was really pleased with my coffee and walnutt cake drink in practice. I pretty much accepted that top 6 was unlikely after that!

My blends were the same triple cert as Hugo for capps and a Daterra, El Salvador and Harrar along with 10% Eden Project coffee. My espresso blend (With the Eden) was a tad to fresh but it did score well on taste and tactile which is good. I also scored pretty well on capps.

My aim was to get into the finals and unfortunately that didn’t happen, I was lucky to get a very decent score at the south west heat but learned very little from the experience, in the semi-finals I scored 604 and it has taught me a few valuable lessons, which I hope will set me in good stead for next year where I will be aiming high. Over the next week or so i’m going to write up some more of my thoughts about the competition.

It was really good to chat with people including Stuart (thanks for the table), Phil, Andy, Jason, Stephen, Anette, James, Barry, Lance, Steve, Marc, Neli and probably many others. The party at Square Mile Coffee Roasters was excellent and much needed after my personal disappointments, thanks to SM for hosting the party and organising the Latte Art smackdown (videos coming soon!!)

Well done once again to Hugo, i’m looking forward to Copenhagen already! If you would like to leave any well done messages for the champ, leave a comment here.

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