2023 World Barista Champion Boram Um reveals how his life has changed since earning the industry’s top title and his mission to put high-grade Brazilian coffee on the global stage.
In Australia, there’s a natural path of progression many coffee professionals take through the industry. They start out slinging shots on an espresso machine as a barista, move into the world of roast curves and blending at a roastery, and eventually get the opportunity to visit origin to forge trade relationships and meet the farmers who grow their beans.
For Boram Um, this route was reversed. Growing up in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, his first position in the industry wasn’t behind a bar but as a Q Grader at his dad’s coffee farm – a role that would ultimately lead him to become the country’s first, and South America’s second, World Barista Champion in 2023.
In the year that’s passed since winning the world title in Athens, Greece, Boram says his life has also been flipped upside down. Spending around 300 of the past 365 days on the road delivering talks, showcasing equipment, and generally being one of the most in-demand people in the coffee community, he’s barely had a moment to reflect on his journey from business graduate interested in elevating his family farm to world-famous barista.
“Winning the World Barista Championship felt surreal in many ways – no one goes into a competition expecting to win. A competitor from Brazil had never even made it to the finals before, so it was very unexpected that I won,” says Boram.
“Since that day, my world has been completely turned upside down. My objective has always been to showcase how Brazilian specialty coffee can be at the top-level and winning has given me a huge platform and opportunity to be able to fulfil that ambition.”
This drive to put high-grade Brazilian coffee on the world stage is what inspired Boram, and his brother Garam (Brazilian Brewers Cup Champion 2023), to enter the realm of competitions in 2017. After establishing café-roastery Um Coffee in São Paulo to share the more nuanced and experimental beans their family farm was starting to produce with the city’s emerging specialty community, the brothers were eager to broaden their audience.
“The first Championships I was really interested in was 2015 when Australian competitor Sasa Sestic won. His was the first routine I’d witnessed that focused highly on coffee production,” he says.
“He talked about new fermentation techniques at a time when, in Brazil, fermentation was still considered a defect. It sparked an interest in me and Garam to learn more and innovate the industry in Brazil, and we saw competing as a way to do that.”
At first, Boram says they encouraged the baristas at their café to compete to improve their skills. At the time, speciality coffee shops were still a novel concept in Brazil, so most of the team only received training from the brothers, who themselves had learned the skills of the trade from studying books, watching online tutorials, and guidance from equipment suppliers.
“In 2017, six months after we opened our first café, one of our baristas placed third in nationals, which made us all very excited,” Boram says.
“Since we were children, my brother and I have always been very competitive, especially when it came to sports. After coaching our team for a few years, in 2019 I think our competitiveness got the better of us and we decided to enter ourselves.”
By this time, Um Coffee had grown into a six-strong collection of specialty cafés across São Paulo, serving own-roasted coffee exclusively from the family farms. While the group of venues, which was scaled back to four during the pandemic, is still a priority for Boram, since winning the Championships his focus has shifted back to the farms in Sul de Minas and Espirito Santo.
“I’m very lucky to have a fantastic team that manage the cafés day to day, which gave me time to train and prepare for the World Barista Championship and now allows me to travel the world to promote Brazil as a quality origin. We’re still a family business, so my brother and mum have a lot of in-put in the cafés and my dad is very focused on the farming side of the company,” he says.
“My plan going forward is to focus more on the farm level and I think coffee production is the future of Um Coffee. The cafés are growing steadily and doing well, but Brazil has a very traditional coffee-drinking culture that won’t adapt to specialty easily.”
During his year of travel, Boram had the opportunity to visit coffee-growing regions around the world, which he says has been hugely influential on his business plans going forward.
“I’ve been lucky enough to meet the most incredible farmers in Panama, Colombia, China, and Indonesia. It’s really interesting to learn about their processes and philosophies,” he says.
“I’ve probably learnt the most from farmers in Colombia and Panama, who are producing the most prized coffee around the world. This first-hand experience has been truly incredible for our farms.”
From these experiences, Boram believes there are two key areas that producers at origin are currently focusing on to drive innovation. The first is genetics and exploring new varieties that can continue to push the boundaries of quality. The second is processing.
“It’s incredible how diverse processing methods are today. Three or four years ago we’d only just started talking about anaerobic fermentation, but now there is huge diversity in what people are exploring and so much innovation in fermentation and drying methods,” he says.
“The market is going in a really diverse direction. I like what I’m seeing and I hope that we can start to explore these avenues at our own farms.”
One of the motivators of this interest in genetics and processing is the impact of climate change, which Boram says farmers in Brazil have witnessed annually for the past six years.
“The effects of climate change have been felt by everyone in coffee in Brazil. Each year, we’ve had to have a completely different strategy for coffee production due to the shifting climatic conditions,” he says.
“Take 2019 for example. We had huge droughts and then a major frost, and we’re still feeling the impacts of that today. The coffee quality has been very challenging to work with and this influences how we process the coffee each year. We are constantly developing strategies to deal with climate change, adapting to extreme changes in temperature.”
Boram believes one of the solutions farmers are being forced to adopt is shade-grown coffee, which decreases production but increases quality while also being a buffer to extreme weather.
“Today, about 40 per cent of our production is shade grown, predominantly in our farms that have been most impacted by extreme weather occurrences,” he says.
Globetrotting between events, exhibitions, and farms also gave the World Barista Champion the chance to experience different café cultures around the world. Of his many highlights, he found particular inspiration in Asia.
“I’m really interested in the omakase style of service in Japan, where one dedicated barista serves four to six customers and shares a unique type of high-end coffee experience,” he says.
“Signature drinks are also huge in Asia. People are increasingly thinking of specialty coffee as an ingredient and they’re bringing more creativity into these concept drinks.”
After realising his World Barista Champion ambition, Boram says he’s hanging up his competition apron, but will continue to wave the flag for Brazilian coffee on the world stage.
This article appears in the October/November 2024 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
