BeanScene Magazine

Photos courtesy Emily Oak and Brian Jones

It was the coming together of some of the greatest minds and greatest coffee, and according to Coffee Common cofounder and WBC Head Judge Brent Fortune, it “almost happened by accident”.

Accident? Surely when an all-star list of baristas, including World Champion Michael Phillips alongside Australia’s own Matt Perger and Emily Oak find themselves making coffee for some of the world’s greatest thinkers – from Bill Gates to Roger Ebert – they haven’t just all wondered into the same café.

As Brent explains the narrative of the Coffee Common, as it turns out, like so many movements in today’s modern context, synergy like this can only come from a series of very fortunate events.

The TED conference is an annual event that brings together some of the world’s greatest thinkers in a platform for innovation and inspiration. As Brent explains it, American coffee roasters Intelligentsia were initially approached to provide coffee for the event, but the resources needed to provide the kind of coffee service they thought would do the event justice was far beyond their means.

Brent was approached by some colleagues to see how he could help out, and this sparked the team’s decision to try and write out a “dream team” list of some of the best baristas in the world. The idea was that if they could put together a list of some of the most passionate baristas, they would be able to pass along that passion about coffee to the TED participants. With the list of TED participants counting some highly influential people, it was worth trying to get the best people they could to take advantage of this opportunity.

“We started to get really overwhelmed by the calibre of people who agreed to come,” says Brent. “Then the more people we got, the easier it was to get others and the list of people happy to pay their way and work for free was incredible.”

It was at this point that the team was put in touch with advertising guru Alex Bogusky, brainchild of the Common concept. Alex has pioneered this movement promoting collaboration as a new way of doing business, where independent contractors pool their resources and share a space.

“By combining their ideas it creates this fascinating energy, this synergy,” Brent explains Alex’s Common concept. “By working together, you can create bigger things. It’s about bringing people together without the corporate structure.”

Seeing how this concept could be applied to the TED project, the team started brainstorming and putting some ideas together. The café had to support the TED concept, which is intended as a space where ideas were shared. In addition to the presentation theatres, there would be some social spaces that would include six coffee bars. At each they decided to offer espresso, as well as pour over coffee, and on one bar, also offer a variety of brew methods including syphon, AreoPress and Chemex.

Instead of serving a single coffee throughout, they scheduled eight different coffees, in line with each of the session breaks.

“We wanted to find a way to create a conversation around the coffee,” says Brent. “We got a feel for how open people were to chatting about Origin, and so on, and worked from there.”

To help get the conversation flowing, they provided a booklet with tasting notes and background information on the coffee. The booklets had an area for note-taking to encourage people to put down their thoughts. On the baristas’ side, they provided a dossier on all the coffees that were being served, with some main talking points.

The main objective was to open the public’s mind about how good coffee can taste, “Coffee Common, no sugar” is one of the movement’s main mottos. In a country dominated by large franchises, getting people to realise how quality coffee can taste on its own, Brent notes, has traditionally been a challenge in the Unites States.

“We really wanted to show them what coffee can be like,” he says. “In the experience we asked ourselves: ‘If we could create a perfect café, this is what it would be like.’” 
As the TED sessions progressed, it became evident that their efforts started paying off.“We were getting comments like: ‘I never knew that coffee could be like this.’ People were moving away from getting sugar in their coffee, and they were so surprised at the taste,” he says. “By the end of the week, people were telling us how hard it would be to go home and drink their old coffee. It was those little wins for us that made the whole thing worth it.”

Similar to the creation of the Coffee Common, Brent’s own journey into the world of coffee was something he says he just kind of “fell into”. Brent had worked for 10 years in the corporate world with companies like Disney, and made his way up the ladder to find himself as a training consultant with the clothing retail chain Old Navy. At the time he was living in San Diego, and a few friends wanted to open a coffee bar. They asked him for some help, and as he researched coffee by going to events like CoffeeFest and the Specialty Coffee Association of America events, he became fascinated by this new world.

“I became like a sponge, I just absorbed all this information and was eager for more,” he says.

This journey led him to realise that where he was living in Southern California, there was not a strong coffee culture, in that all customers wanted was “a 16-ounce coffee that they can sip on at the café for three hours”.

He made connections with Stumptown as well as Intelligentsia, and American roaster who helped pioneer direct-to-origin trade, and realised he needed to move to the heart of the United States coffee culture – the Pacific NorthWest, Portland, Oregon.

“I wanted to be around people like [Stumptown] to continue my own journey,” he says. Upon making the big move, he bought a bakery and for six and a half years built up the business to create a strong coffee reputation. He just sold the business last December.

One of the reasons he sold that business was to further his involvement in the international coffee scene. For the last four years he has worked with the World Barista Championships (WBC) on the judging and national support committee, and currently is a head judge. As a largely volunteer-driven organisation (the WBC only has one full-time staff) Brent was eager to help build up the competition’s judging standards as it gained increasing international attention.

In applying his experience in business management, Brent has helped lead a series of certification sessions to ensure those judging at international competitions are ready for the job of picking the world’s top barista. The workshops are not training sessions, but a series of tests held over two days. The tests include sensory testing, where a judge’s palette is assessed; a written test where coffee knowledge and knowledge of WBC rules is proven; a blank score sheet the judges need to fill out from memory; a memory test where the judges are shown a video, and they have to recall the barista’s actions; and finally a mock judging session where their interaction with the barista is observed. In the last year, they’ve held certification workshops in Colombia, Italy, South Korea, California and most recently in New Zealand (see page 91 for more details).
The sessions are not easy, and Brent says they currently have around an 60 per cent passing rate.

Over the years, they have also refined the judging standards. To be a judge, you need two years of international experience, meaning you have experience judging out of your own country. In ensuring judges have worked in other countries, Brent notes it should help lessen the natural regional bias. With countries holding such different coffee cultures, it can be a challenge to assess in a different environment, but one necessary when judging at the international level. 

“Globally we try and touch as many countries as we can, to get judges certified from everywhere,” he says. This means Brent regularly travels to run the sessions, a price he is happy to pay. “It’s such an awesome gig, you get an excuse to travel all over the world.”

It’s an angle to the job he never imagined when he first started helping out his friends with their San Diego café.

Emily Oak on the Coffee Commons
If someone asked you to pay your own way to fly to Los Angeles and make coffee for a week as a volunteer for some of the world’s most influential and forward thinking people, what would you say? Add to that the opportunity to challenge yourself professionally by working with a diverse team of professionals and unfamiliar coffees and I’m fairly sure you couldn’t offer a coffee professional a better carrot.

This was the opportunity presented to me recently when invited to participate in the Coffee Common launch project at TED in Long Beach in early March.

As a barista in Australia we are fairly lucky to be exposed to a good and diverse range of specialty end coffees. Thanks largely to modern technologies like the Internet, we are not really ‘left behind’ or as isolated as we might think in relation to what might be happening at the forefront of our industry. In fact it might be argued that in some areas Australia is most certainly leading some elements or at the very least proudly putting our own spin on them.

Four baristas from Australia were invited to participate at TED, alongside another 25 from around eight different countries including the USA, Canada, UK, Norway and Guatemala. The goal was diversity as well as uniformity.

For me the experience was amazing on a number of levels. Not only the opportunity to be present at TED in the continually electric atmosphere, but an opportunity to explore new coffees, theories and methodologies with other professionals who were equally eager to learn and share.

To have the same coffees interpreted slightly differently, but all done well, was wonderful. To learn more about the diversity of markets, of customer expectations and of ways of engaging with our audiences was equally rewarding. More than anything though, the experience at TED and of Coffee Common reassured me that what we do here in Australia is equally valid as any other specialty coffee market around the world. There is no one perfect, true or right way to make and share good coffee, as long as the basics are all the same, there is absolutely room for interpretation. I think this variety allows exploration and continued improvement that otherwise might not be so eagerly pursued, and at the same time by maintaining an underlying common goal, all aspects of the specialty coffee supply chain benefit.