A chat with Eden-Marie Abramowicz
We talk with leading coffee consultant, educator, and budding tax wizard.
You first started training for competitions on top of full-time work. Was that something that was thrust upon you or did you say, ‘I want to be a competition barista now’?
In everything that I’ve done ever, I start like, ‘I’m just going to dabble in this.’ Maybe I’m going to dance, or I’m going to start playing chess, just for fun. And then within two weeks, I’m like, ‘I need to be the best. I learn to learn everything.’ Coffee competition was just an extension of that.
I started working at a Jittery Joe’s half a mile from my high school because it was a very cool place to work. I would cut class in high school and go there and drink coffee. The staff were guys in bands and girls with tattoos who wrote poetry, and I’d sit there and think ‘this is what I want to do’. I started pestering them for a job, because I knew I had to get a job, and of all the jobs in my town, that seemed like the coolest option.
We had no idea why he had this entourage of people with raspberries and cups.
Getting into the competition world happened organically. The World Barista Championships were happening in Atlanta, Georgia, that year [2009] and with the competitors needing space to train they’d say, ‘Okay, competitor from Colombia, you come train in this shop.’ They were giving them a place to come and practise their drinks.
So this international competitor comes up and starts working on one of our machines and there were like five or six people huddled watching him and coaching him. We were like, ‘What is this?’ We’d never seen anything of the sort. We had no idea what a barista competition was. We had no idea why he had this entourage of people with raspberries and cups. That was my first awareness of a barista competition.
The following season, I decided to volunteer at regionals. I remember being so intimidated by how intensely they were cleaning the machines in between competitors. I was thinking, ‘This is so intense!’ That year, [2018 World Barista Champion] Lem Butler was competing and he poured two cappuccinos at the same time, left and right hands. Seeing that was a life-changer for me. The following year, I got up there and did it.
How’d it go?
Oh, terrible! I distinctly remember being backstage and going on the Intelligentsia website to learn what was in the Black Cat Espresso because I heard all the other competitors saying, ‘This coffee is 20 per cent Brazil and 30 per cent washed and 45 per cent whatever’ and I had no idea what was in my coffee. I was online trying to figure out what was in the blend just before going on stage and trying to tell the judges!
What did you take from that feeling of underpreparedness? What was the biggest lesson from your first competition?
Suck less.
I was online trying to figure out what was in the blend just before going on stage and trying to tell the judges!
You went from working for one of the biggest specialty coffee companies to deciding to start your independent consultancy, Bastet Coffee. Was that a scary leap?
Terrifying! Petrifying! Intelligentsia was like my family. I was there for so long and was so close to a lot of the people there. I genuinely have love for many of the people that I worked with at Intelligentsia and there were wonderful role models for me. Going off on my own was terrifying. When we had the conversation [about me leaving], my immediate boss was so rad and happy for me, and that was the moment where I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I really can do this. It’s really time for me to leave the nest and see what I can do.’
What are the crucial differences between being part of a big company and self-employment or running your own company?
Taxes! There’s a lot of things I had to teach myself on the fly. Web design. Taxes. All these things I didn’t go to school for!
How big a part of your workload is marketing and social media? You have an amazing social media presence.
Social media definitely takes up time. It is part of my job, but really is fun and ultimately just for me, and that’s why you won’t really see me doing paid sponsorships. I don’t do a lot of direct promotional stuff even for my own company. That being said, if I try a new roaster and try something that I love and is genuinely awesome, you’ll see it. I give shout-outs all the time, but I’m not getting paid to do it. I do it because it’s good.
Do you think there’s a prescribed specialty coffee aesthetic that works for social media?
There’s certainly that type of point-of-view composition like ‘here’s my hand holding coffee’ (of which I am guilty often), but other specialty coffee identities take different approaches. I like to get more genuine personality on my Instagram, which is why I’m starting to get more into the video content because it gives you more actual communication, an actual snippet into my life, the actual person behind the coffee cup. But it’s like the web design, the taxes … now I have to do video editing too?
I like to get more genuine personality on my Instagram
Back to hospitality, is there a place, an industry from which the coffee world can draw inspiration?
Yes. Bartending. A lot of it in terms of hospitality and efficiently communicating with the guest. A lot of baristas you see have on and off moments — at the register they may be really personable, but they turn around and the second they’re at the machine they’re different. Bartenders don’t do that. It shouldn’t take 100 per cent of the focus. Sometimes when you see baristas watching shots you think ‘how many shots have you watched in your lifetime? You should have it by now.’ Or staring at the bloom and not the customer. Just calm down, smile, interact with your people.
At the risk of this conversation taking a macabre turn, how would you like to die?
I would like to die after an amazing meal. You know, like you go into a food coma and just never recover.
The full version of this interview is published in Standart Issue 8 in print.
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