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Our very own Carlos is crowned Australian Brewers Cup Champion!
Our very own Carlos is crowned Australian Brewers Cup Champion!

24 Mar 2021

 

Our very own Carlos Escobar is crowned Australian Brewers Cup Champion!

Toby's Estate are incredibly proud to announce that our very own Carlos Escobar is the newly crowned Australian Brewers cup champion. The number one brewer with the highest scoring coffee in Australia. Get your hands on the coffee that Carlos used here in our shop.

Carlos and the Toby's team spent months preparing for this fiercely contested and highly regarded competition, working on both the presentation and the expression of the coffee that he served.

For an account of the whole process, super coach and Toby's Coffee Trainer Simon Gautherin has given his account of the competition itself and the process the team went through to bring home the bacon.

November 2019, Carlos places second in the Brewers Cup Championship after competing in Perth. The Australian Nationals were meant to take place in late March 2020, the competition ended up being cancelled and the rest is history.

8 months later in November 2020, there is a rumour that the Australian Nationals would be held at the start of 2021 depending on the Covid-19 situation and the governmental regulations in Australia. This is when we decided to start working towards that competition again. We put together a plan, a timeline and broke down and split the work that had to be done to get to where we wanted.

 

Preparing for the Competition

  • The routine: To compete in the Brewers Cup Championship, competitors need to prepare a 10 minute presentation called a Routine during which they talk about the coffee, brew it and serve it alongside accurate tasting notes. Carlos already knew what he wanted to talk about and what was motivating him to compete. The routine was the first thing we locked in, months before the competition so that he could practice and rehearse as much as possible.
  • Coffee: We started sourcing a coffee end of December when the competition date was officially communicated – it is a huge challenge to source an exceptional lot so close to the date of competition. Our entire team sent messages to friends and fellow coffee professionals around the World to get our hands onto a coffee that could take down the Australian Championship. Usually, if the coffee isn’t in the top 5 best coffee we’ve ever had, we wouldn’t consider it for competition. Eventually, two friends of mine in Taiwan and in the Philippines helped us source that coffee. We sample roasted a bunch of potential competition lots and put together a cupping table adding other extraordinary coffees we had in our freezer collection for benchmark purposes and this WAAshed geisha from Finca El Paraiso crushed the entire table with its refined tropical acidity and strawberry jam sweetness. That coffee also happened to be from Colombia which was just perfect for Carlos’ routine. We were mind blown and from that moment, we knew this coffee had the potential to win.
  • Roasting: We started roasting a few batches of the Ikawa sample roaster to have an idea of the potential of the coffee and start working towards a brewing recipe. The potential of the Ikawa was quickly reached and we knew that coffee had so much more to offer. Our roasting team, that includes Nich Rae and Josh Haidinger started roasting that coffee on a larger drum roaster tweaking the roast profile throughout different batches until we found an absolute cracking roast!
  • Brewing: We already had an idea of to brew the coffee and Carlos had already locked a certain number of variables such as the brewer, the brewing pattern, and most of the equipment he would use to compete. The whole brewing process AKA the dialling-in of the coffee is about getting to know how the coffee behaves through age and how it reacts to changes in variables – you want to get intimate which that coffee to be able to predict how it will evolve and taste on the day on the competition. We spent countless weekends, morning and evenings before and after work practicing, testing one variable at a time with the help of superstar Charlotte Malaval to refine the cup profile that we wanted.

Competition Time: The week in Melbourne

  • Tuesday: Carlos and I arrived in Melbourne on Tuesday, 2 days before the competition, we had a strong plan for the practice and knew exactly what we had to do. The benefit of working for a large company like Toby’s Estate is that we used our logistics team to send the 50 kg of equipment we had down to Melbourne directly. We did a few run throughs of the routine on Tuesday and went to bed early to be ready for a long day the next day.
  • Wednesday: The rest of the team landed in Melbourne and joined us at our apartment around midday. Carlos and I were already up since dawn to start tasting the coffee, take some notes and tweak the recipe. By the end of the day, we had drunk more coffee than a normal human being could take in a whole month and we had not really achieved what we aimed for. The coffee didn’t taste like we wanted, and the competition was in less than 24 hours. At this stage we knew the coffee would change the next day, open up, gain in flavour intensity and lose some of its dry aftertaste. We decided tweak the plan for the D-day and play exclusively with our water recipe. I’m not going to hide it, this was a stressful moment for everybody and it was important that we kept our head cool and stayed focus. Having a whole team to support a competitor is often overlooked but this is how you can stay focused and keep your calm during those stressful and emotionally intense moments.
  • Thursday: Backstage, only Carlos and I were allowed to be there due to Covid restrictions, we brewed one last coffee to confirm the tasting notes and this was the best brew we had ever tried of that coffee and we knew this coffee was going to do extremely well. Carlos was ready, he was focused, he went on stage and delivered what I believe to be the best Brewers Cup performance ever and he made it through to the finals on Saturday. That same evening, we decided not celebrate, go to bed early and stay focused to prepare all day on Friday for the final Compulsory Round.The alarm rang at 5am and we jumped right into the brewing, we had no time to waste as Carlos was competing at 4:20pm and we still had a lot of work to do. We started by testing all the roasts profiles we picked the night before to narrow it down to one and stick to that one only to dial-in the coffee. As usual, we always brew and taste the coffee blind to avoid any personal bias – when all 6 of us picked a different cup as their favourite coffee, we knew this was going to be a long and stressful day. We decided to stick to the plan and explore more variables in the water, everyone knew what they had to do and we tested in number of variables in a record time. One person was grinding, one brewing, one keeping track on time, one building water recipes, one taking notes and one supervising the whole operations. A few hours later, the coffee tasted incredible and we locked the final recipe in – we packed the equipment and went straight to the venue.
  • Friday: Early start, once more. We talked about the strategy for Compulsory and worked a lot on the workflow to maximise time. In the Compulsory round, all competitors have the same coffee and no information on it – they all have 38 minutes to brew and serve the best cup possible. We did 8 rounds of practice, drank litres of coffee and by 8pm everything was ready.
  • Saturday: The finals and the result announcements, it also happened to be my Birthday. Carlos and I couldn’t sleep, he was up all night. We met in the kitchen at 4am and he told me he would win that trophy on that day for my birthday, he didn’t seem stressed or tired, he was in “the zone” and we knew nothing could stop him. Same story backstage, we set-up everything, the preparation was flawless, he went on stage and everything went according to plan. After that, we went for a late lunch to celebrate my birthday and the whole competition before heading back to the venue for the results.

The Results

I think if you need to remember only one thing from this trip, it is the whole result announcement. As we finished lunch, I ordered a Uber to get straight to the competition venue. After a huge sleep deficit and a few glasses of wine, I couldn’t really focus anymore. I opened the Uber app, ordered a ride and it wasn’t until 20 minutes later that I realised we were going to the wrong place. I had ordered a ride back to the apartment and not to the competition venue. If you’ve ever been to Melbourne on a rainy Saturday afternoon (or any Saturday), you’d know that driving around the city is absolutely insane.

By the time we jumped into a second Uber, the announcements had already started. We were 15 minutes away and I thought Carlos was going to have a heart attack when they started announcing the Brewers Cup top 3 before realising he wasn’t there yet and deciding to wait until he arrived. Everybody was calling and texting us asking where the hell we were. 15 long minutes later we arrive at the venue, run inside for the announcement and we all know what happens next – Carlos is crowned Australian Brewers Cup Champion 2020.

This is an incredible achievement, our second Brewers Cup competition together and already 2 wins in a row. We went through tough times, difficult practices, a lot of hard work was put into this competition and sacrifices were made but in the end, the dedication and methodology paid off. We were obviously aiming for a victory but for us , competing has always been about the process, learning about ourselves and about coffee and regardless of the result, we never wanted to not win for the lack of work and preparation.

There are a lot of work that happens behind the scene and it’s hard to capture that in a 10 minute presentation. There are many other hilarious and stressful moments Carlos and the team have been through but I hope that I managed to capture the essence of it for everyone to understand what it takes to win the Australian Brewers Cup Championship.