for me the best part of the day is always the early morning open shift
everything is fresh it's clean we get to dial in some super delicious coffees
and hopefully get one in before we let the outside world in today i'm hanging out with
georgia at our sydney espresso bar to find out what her process is behind the scenes
so georgia we've been able to pull you away from the bar for a quick chat i want to find out what
your process is for setting up the espresso bar in the morning what's the first thing that you do do
you have a nice little sneaky coffee what is what are your steps absolutely not there's lots of work
to do i will come in i will unlock the door turn the lights on so i'd turn on both grinders i'd put
the beans in don't touch that yet though i'd turn the machine off eco mode and then i'll open up the
doors because the temperature differences inside and outside can have a big effect on the coffee
when i when i do open up so i like to let that air circulate then i'll put some music on which
is arguably the most important step so then i turn on my Ubermilk the Ubermilk is an automatic milk
frother it draws milk out of this big container that we've got in the fridge so that needs to
be filled up with milk then i prep all of the small items you know filling my chocolate shaker
stock up lids and cups and then by the time i finish that it's usually you know my machine and
my grinders are ready to go so i will season the machine that literally means running a couple of
shots through the machine first thing and you don't drink them at all you want to make sure
there's a little bit of coffee oils in there it also stops any chance of chemicals from
the cleaning the day before going into somebody's cup of coffee yeah that would not be good yeah so
seasoning the machine you always seize it and then you throw out those shots then i'll set up my nock
tube and scales and stuff like that and then once i've got my scales there i'm ready to dial in the
coffee so i will run a few shots through you know obviously checking dose the weight of the espresso
and the time if that's running correctly to my recipe then i will taste it and if it needs a
little tweaking i'll do that depending on like you know the date so you don't like taste the coffee
straight out of the machine you actually break it down dial it in as close as you can to your
recipe and then taste your coffee yeah right why why do you sort of approach coffee in that amount
because the recipe is usually a good starting point that's usually what tastes good i won't need
to i've found that recipe specific to that coffee so i won't need to change that very often you know
it's only on days where like the coffee might be a little fresher than usual or a little older
um that i'll need to tweak it a little bit you know maybe make it run a couple
of seconds longer or shorter or adjust the dose a little bit um yeah do you have to keep dying
in your coffee throughout the day or is it like just set at once you're good for the whole day
yes especially on days where the temperature and the humidity are pretty haywire you know i
get a lot of questions customers come in they're like how many coffees do you drink a day and i
i don't know how to answer that question because i'm constantly you know quality
controlling tasting espressos all throughout the day just making sure that it's still tasting good
so how many coffees do you work with on bar that go through the espresso machine
okay so we work with two different blends we use one on alternative milks and one on our dairy
based coffees and then we use a single origin for espressos and long blacks and then we also use
a filter roast single origin for the batch brew we use a Marco brew there's lots of different batch
brewers that you can use to make a batch brew but the Marco brew is pretty straightforward
i'll put the water in you need to wet the paper to make sure there's no papery taste
in the in the coffee because a lot of compounds in that paper will come through unless it's pre-wet
then last thing i do is grind and weigh the coffee that i'm popping in
and yeah and then it drips through and i pop it in a carafe to serve everyone you mentioned before
that you actually use two different blends one for alternative milks and one for dairy coffee
is there reasoning behind that why do we use two different coffees
our wild blend which we use on alternative milks it's it's a bit more out there than a lot of
other coffee blends so it has a really distinct sweet flavor you know rockmelon and sweet candy
so for alternative milks that generally have like quite a distinctive flavor it
tends to go well because it cuts through that distinctive flavor of the alternative milk better
so the one we use for the dairy milk it's a bit of a crowd pleaser so milk chocolate orange flavor
notes much more like a typical coffee than the wild is the single origins are usually roasted for
black coffee so with a lot of them you know sometimes you'll get a single origin that has
that nice bitter body but typically they don't have enough body to be able to cut through the
milk the same way that a blend does Georgia thank you so very much for letting us be
able to tear you away from the espresso bar and get an inside look behind what a barista does
behind the espresso bar but definitely guys let us know down in the comments would you like to
see more of what happens behind the scenes when it comes to coffee until next time stay stoked