When there’s a score for “persistence of crema” and your crema collapses, it doesn’t matter if your coffee tastes better – you won’t be scoring full marks for persistence. It just ain’t persisting. You may pick up awesome marks for taste balance, overall impression etc, especially if you say “I chose to pull really fresh shots so you, the judges, can taste X,Y and Z in your coffee, and I chose to sacrifice crema persistence because the fruit bomb tails off after day 3, while real crema persistence only kicks in on day 5. There wasn’t a way to have both”. Then you prove you know your … coffee. And that gives you an overall higher score, as the overall impression of the barista goes up too. We think you know you stuff, you’ve lost a few marks to give us something great, and we appreciate it.

Nick even says “Whether or not “persistence of crema” is a value that the industry should be promoting or not is definitely a debatable point.” as his opening sentence, before going with the more traditional Hoffman opening in the rest of the chess game, sorry, paragraph. Nick is right…..Isaiah didn’t get punished for hard tamps, polishing etc….he got scored by the sensory judges according to the way he hit or missed the mark for the stuff listed on their scoresheets. Amount of polishing wasn’t on there. It’s not on the tech scoresheets either. He wasn’t scored for it. Couldn’t happen, didn’t happen.

If Brian were to support his staff a bit better, he’d have known this. And if you changed your hard tamp cafe enforcement for the comp and went with a lighter one, Isaiah couldn’t get penalised for it anyhow. Idiot.

And yes, the crema rules have changed after feedback from competitors and judges. And they could well change again. It’s an evolving competition – just read the rules, then practice. Then win.

It’s okay Jason, Nick Cho and all his douche beard bros made us look like asses to outsiders long ago (“I’ll punch you in the dick”). It is public record that Cho is completely incompetent and criminally insane. It is also common knowledge that most competition spro jockeys are complete asses, since the only thing these contests benefit is the ego of the barista or corporate “lifestyle brand” roasters sponsoring them.
My 2 cents: Double Shot rocks, tastes similar to Intelligentsia to me, if you all got your heads out of your asses long enough to try his roasts you would see. And the so-called “judges” at the contest in question are complete Intelli lackeys, he is so right.

Brian is the star, go suck his tit.

BTW, coffeeman, are you seriously holding a grudge becuase you never got a “thank you” note for ordering coffee from a business?

Me thinks some people are taking this topic (and themselves) too seriously.

Much of what is portrayed here is inaccurate and not really germane to the original discussion.

As for the comments being “public,” I say more power to these guys being public with their debates, rather than hiding behind anonymous screen-names. As for what started the debate, it was a posting on the DS blog I’d encourage you all to read and continue to follow, rather than assuming this article–which is funny–portrays the whole story. If you do, you’ll find that the competition wasn’t really the point, but was a springboard to a larger discussion about the value of crema and what makes a coffee sweet and a few other items that challenge some assumptions. For those of you in the industry, there are some very interesting discussions in the comments between Jay Caragay and James Hoffman and Brian about the science behind it.

As for you, coffeeman, I don’t know who you are, because you aren’t courageous enough to put a name behind your words. But if you truly are a long-time customer of the DS, you’ll know who I am, because this is my real name, and you’ll probably see me in there in the morning, with many of the other long-term customers of DS, enjoying our morning public debates. Feel free to come introduce yourself.

Brian is the person who does not listen, or care.