Our troops are back from the Specialty Coffee Association annual convention, where the United States Barista Competition (USBC) took place last week in Minneapolis. Kudos to our two competitors, Mike Marquard and Alex McCracken, for both making it to the semi-finals. That means that they rank among America's 25 best baristas! Mike reports that he enjoyed speaking with the farmers who grew some of the coffee in the espresso blend he brewed at the event. "On Sunday, I met two of the farmers from Cerro Las Ranas, El Salvador - luckily, they spoke great English and I was able to tell them that their coffee played a crucial role in my competition blend and my success over the weekend," Mike says. "They were able to watch my routine and afterward conveyed pride that I talked about their coffee so confidently."Both Alex and Mike picked up on trends in espresso drink preparation during the convention. While the hot new thing in coffee the past couple of years has been different ways of brewing drip coffee, such as using the Clover coffee brewer, this year the focus was on perfecting espresso, Mike observes. "Espresso is making a strong resurgence," he says. "The USBC was a mix of old style blends (Brazil+Indonesia+Ethiopia), direct-trade single origins (El Salvador or Brazil), and heaps of something in-between. What was more evident was that baristas are learning their espressos bean by bean, not just throwing everything in a hopper and hoping for a good profile. USBC champ Kyle Glanville won overall using a single-origin direct-trade El Salvador and did not win on technical scores. This defeats the common belief that single-origin espressos lack complexity and fullness."

Coffee pros are also always analyzing how espresso is brewed, or extracted. Alex says that baristas in pursuit of the perfect shot are experimenting with the effects of water in the process. "One new thing everyone will be messing with will be preinfusion," he says. Preinfusion is a fancy word for wetting the espresso grounds before the hi-pressure water forces its way through. "There is speculation that a few seconds of low pump pressure will let the coffee puck expand or de-gas and therefore the extraction would occur differently. I'm not so sure it would make a difference, but we will see."