Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/139019
COURTESY OF CAFÉ IMPORTS FIRST LINK IN THE CHAIN: Arnulfo Leguizamo, owner of Colombia's Finca La Primavera, produced the coffee Licata used in his WBC-winning routine. I go to WBC and I get second place to a coffee-producing country, then I'm OK with that. And that's exactly what happened. After Bogota I still got invited a lot of places and had a lot of really good opportunities. So I dealt with second place just fine I think; I was never terribly angry. I was just disappointed. Q:A: What'd you do between the 2011 WBC and this one? I moved from Hawaii back to the Kansas City area, where I'm originally from. In 2012 I decided to judge because I figured I wasn't going to compete again. That experience of judging really opened my eyes and gave me an enormous amount of perspective on what I was doing. I was going through judges training like, "That's what you're looking for?" And then eventually I started thinking about competing again. When you've competed as long as I have, you always see things and think, "That's a good idea for competition," or, "That's a good song for competition." And I gained a little bit more motivation to try it again. But I was absolutely intent on this being my last year. If I hadn't won the U.S. this year, I wouldn't have come back to compete again. Q: A: In what ways was this year's routine superior to your routine in 2011? One of the things I wanted to do this year was bring the focus back to the barista—it's a barista skills competition, after all. So I'm glad this is what won. I think this presentation was much more complete in a lot of ways, and I'm happy that I was representing more than myself. In 2011 I was basically talking about what I had done with the coffee, and it was maybe a little arrogant. I took everything into my hands, which is a great story and an absolutely amazing learning experience, but this time I was representing other people who did a lot of work. This routine was still about me and how I had experienced the coffee, but it wasn't just about me. Q: A: Tell me about the process of discovering the coffee you used. The farmer is Arnulfo Leguizamo, who owns a farm called La Primavera in Colombia. I learned about him after I had some basic concepts in my head for what I wanted to do with competition. I wanted to focus on multiple levels of the coffee chain because I think in the past we've focused just on a farmer or just on certain things. And I met with Joe Marrocco from [importing company] Café Imports to talk about some of their fresh-crop coffees coming in, and he started telling me about Arnulfo and his expertise—supposedly he can walk into a cupping room with 30 or 40 other farms' coffee on the table, taste them all and pick out which one came from his farm. He knows his coffee just from tasting it, which is impressive. So I was interested in using Arnulfo's coffee because of that continued on page 50 freshcup.com July 2013 49