Vitaly Nevmerzhytsky carefully pours coffee beans into the mill and tamps them down. It’s the first stage of an intricate process of making the perfect cup of coffee.
Nevmerzhytsky, the winner of the 2015 Ukrainian Barista Championship, has honed his skill by making thousands of cups of coffee in his career. He says that even one mistake can spoil the drink.
The country’s top barista has only been in the profession for about a year.
While there are special courses to train people up in the profession, most people in the business learn from a fellow barista or a café owner. But it wasn’t always easy to find a great cup of coffee in Kyiv.
According to Nevmerzhytsky, coffeemaking has gone through three waves, or ages, in the last 30 years. During the first age, “the Dark Coffee Age,” it was rare to find a fancy coffee machine and a barista in a café.
Low-quality, strong black coffee would be made in a cezve (a small, Turkish-style brass or copper pot). And requests for latte would be met by a blank stare in most coffee shops.
But after the millennium, the second wave of coffee consumption started, when specialized cafes like Coffee House (founded in 1999 in Moscow as a post-Soviet answer to Starbucks), started popping up in big Ukrainian cities.
The third wave started about five years ago, when lots of cafés started to serve specialty coffee, and even to roast coffee beans in-house.
Now a huge range of types of coffee are easily available, and the job of barista, or specialized coffee bar attendant, has come into its own. A good barista helps clients navigate their way between the large number of choices now available on café menus to find the perfect cup of coffee for them.
Nevmerzhytsky says there are two main ways of preparing coffee: with the help of a coffee machine, or with alternative methods like brewing coffee in a cezve, aeropress, or pour over. Nevmerzhytsky himself specializes in brewing coffee in a cezve.
A good barista will select only the best coffee beans, making sure none of them are spoiled. He checks the equipment and unes it to match the optimal roasting requirements of the particular bean type. The baristas of the world’s most prestigious cafés even visit the coffee plantations to check how the coffee is harvested.
Nevmerzhytsky says that the best coffee is always made from fresh beans, so customers should check the date they were roasted. Customers can always tell if an espresso was made from recently roasted beans, as the drink will have a strong aroma and a foamy top, he says.
The coffee should also be served in special cups with thick sides that have been warmed before the coffee is poured. A well-made coffee shouldn’t be bitter or sour. The taste of specialty beans develops gradually, and should match the description indicated on the pack.
Nevmerzhytsky says a true cappuccino should be sweet without adding sugar – all the sweetness should come from the milk. He also advises his customers to order a glass of water to refresh the taste buds in between sips of strong coffee.
