Coffee Conversations: Barista Education with Rachel Apple

A lot of people in the U.S. coffee industry miss Barista Camp, the education-focused retreat hosted by the Barista Guild in the 2010s. While other events have popped up to try and fill the gap after the guild transitioned to a different event called Access in 2018, there hasn’t been anything to replace the combination of education and sleepaway camp vibes of the original Barista Camp. 

Now, though, a group of coffee educators is trying to revive that vibe. Raise The Bar is the brainchild of Rachel Apple, a coffee consultant, competition judge, and photographer based in Boston, who founded the non-profit alongside industry pros Ivana Chan and Sandra Loofbourow. Their first event, Level Up, takes place over the weekend of September 27-29 at Mill City Roasters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Eighty baristas will learn from a who’s who of industry luminaries including Morgan Eckroth, Kat Melheim, Ever Meister, Carly Green, and lots more. 

Importantly, Level Up is designed with baristas in mind and will be specifically non-competitive.

“I’m not a competitor, I don’t have the competitive spirit”, Apple tells me. “I want to support people, which is why I judge, but I don’t want to compete. And I think that a lot of people don’t think competitions are for them, or that they have a problematic framework to begin with, and since there’s no longer a Barista Camp there’s not a good space for baristas to just come together”.

I spoke with Apple about her background, the state of barista education in the U.S., and what she hopes Level Up can achieve.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and I should also note that Apple is a paid subscriber to The Pourover.

Can you give me a bit of background about your start in coffee?
I started in coffee in 2006 when I was in art school in Kansas City and I moved right down the street from this shop called Latte Land. My mom would always take us to these big second wave coffee shops growing up, and I thought that baristas were the pinnacle of cool. I was like, who doesn’t want to be an art student in, to me, at the time, the big city, and work in a coffee shop?

I got really lucky because, even though the place was called Latte Land, they were serving specialty coffee in 2006—I didn’t understand how good I had it until many years later. I loved that job for the regulars, for the hospitality, for the play of it: it was back in the days of syrups, cinnamon on top, super dry cappuccinos; the energy was so good. I was so happy being a barista for years, but I really wasn’t curious about what happened [to the coffee] before it showed up in the bag in front of me.

That was a different era of access to education, and I remember that the first book we had was by Scott Rao (The Professional Barista’s Handbook) which came out in 2008. I was this 19-year-old kid, I was so excited, ‘Oh I get to learn something new about my job?’ and I was reading that book and was like, “Why is this man mad at me for wanting to learn? Why am I in trouble for reading this man’s book?” But there wasn’t any other content at the time, so that’s what you got.

How did you become interested in being a coffee educator?
I had changed schools and moved back to Oklahoma. I went back and finished my photography degree, and through all that I was working in coffee shops as a barista. 

I had a manager named Kate Gilmore [around 2011], and she taught me that it’s cool to not know everything, it’s cool to be curious, and it’s cool to be nice to people as a barista, to be warm and inviting rather than slow-dripping the information or being the most informed one in the room. So I kind of took all the little pieces along the way and started inviting people in, like, “Do you want to taste this next to this? Do you want to do it better?”

But I also didn’t know that much. I had been working for six or seven years, I could crush a rush or make three pour overs at once. I could do all the barista and service things, but I didn’t really have a lot of knowledge. Customers would come in and talk about [coffee leaf rust] and that was huge, devastating, but I couldn’t find the information. Where is it? Where do I seek out coffee information that’s not so scientific that I don’t have interest in understanding it, or so bullshit that it’s like in those little CNN blurbs. Still, at that point, there wasn’t anything.

The closest thing I had was the roastery we bought our coffee from. I couldn’t understand that when I went to their coffee shop, it tasted better there than what I could do at [my] shop, and it drove me nuts. So I would take my days off and I would drive up to the city and post up at their bar and just batter them with questions. Why are you using a scale? What do you mean ‘ratio’? Why does it matter?

You eventually became a roaster at this shop, but then moved to Boston a couple of years later. Can you tell me a bit about working for George Howell?
It was 2016 and he was opening up the flagship cafe, but they hadn’t posted any jobs. I wrote a thoughtful cover letter for a production job, because that’s the job that was listed. And the director of the roastery called me and was like, “This isn’t the job for you but let me introduce you to the cafe folks”.

My interview went for two hours, and they were like, “We’re building this space, George has this vision, he’s really education-focused because he thinks that people won’t value what they don’t understand, so it’s his mission to get people to understand”. They wanted to open up their retail space, they had this big retail space with a mobile cupping table, and [George] had a vision of having free public-facing education, but that was the end of it.

So I just got playground time, I had refractometers, I had two Kees van der Westen [espresso machines], I had any coffee that I wanted from the freezer. I was given a little budget and had free reign to teach how I wanted to teach. It was so fun, I think I was teaching 10 classes a week.

Then I moved out to the roastery, but I still supported their educational events, and I would host people at the roastery. And I got even more access behind the curtains. I’m a Hungry Hungry Hippo for tasting and knowledge and wanting to understand.

I’d been in coffee for 12 years at that point, and [now] I was on the coast and I had access to more things. I was just a train ride away from New York and I had George’s name behind me, so people would treat me differently or allow me into the room.

I still feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants with George Howell and Cup of Excellence, that’s what people tend to associate me with, but it’s like, if I get to create a space it’s going to be the space that I wish I had [when I started]. I’m not going to gatekeep because fucking why? Why gatekeep knowledge? If you care so much about a thing and you want it to succeed and thrive, why not make it accessible? 

So was that part of the impetus for Raise the Bar and the Level Up event? Creating the welcoming, educational space you wish you’d had?
Even latte art throwdowns are competitive, like they’re good natured but you still have to step up if you want to play. And I just don’t think you should have to have a competition to be able to be in a community. Why can’t we just hang out, have that camp-y vibe, and learn?

Historically, barista education has been, “So this is extraction, this is bar flow, this is milk sharing”. But what about hospitality? What about Erica [Escalante]’s classes where she teaches business for baristas, so they can understand labour and why their business is working that way? Or Eric [Grimm]’s de-escalation and HR training? Being a barista isn’t just one thing. 

I hate it when I meet kids who say, “Oh, I’m just a barista”. No! No. I correct them every single time. You don’t know that you’re a salesperson, you don’t know that you’re a sensory professional, you don’t know because you’re not given the language because then that gives you power.

Baristas are the last bastion between the entire supply chain and the person that gets to consume it, and they’re also the second-most ostracised piece of that industry, right? The ends of our supply chain are the least connected to the middle.

So basically, we were down at Black & White [Coffee Roasters in North Carolina] last fall, we were having this conversation over cocktails with me, Ivana, Alexandra Littlejohn, and Kat, and we were shooting the shit, like “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a Barista Camp again? It would be cool if someone did that”. And then we left, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Like, okay, how do we make this happen?

So Raise The Bar is yourself, Ivana, and Sandra Loofbourow. And you’ve got an advisory board too, right?
Sandra was around for Barista Camp but me and Ivana never got to go, and we needed some sort of outside perspective. So I invited Kat, ALJ, and Lauren Lathrop to be our board members, because Lauren has been working on Mill City [Roasters in Minneapolis]’s educational space.

We’d had these soft conversations about teaching classes there, and I was like, what if we did it at Mill City? It’s got pretty good public transit, they have places like Cafe Imports, Espresso Services, I think Trabocca is there—it’s a coffee hub. And [Minnesota] is a safer state right now, they have really progressive immigrant, gay, and trans protections.

So we decided to do it, and I was certainly the one functioning under the bull-headed delusion of, we can do it. I’ll just found a nonprofit. We’ll just fundraise all the money that we need. I wanted it to be sustainable in that we are paying instructors, we are housing instructors, we are feeding people. We don’t have the money to put in ourselves, but Ivana is not scared of asking for money and I learned that from her very quickly.

Can you tell me a little about the scholarship aspect of the event?
So 25% of our attendees will be scholarship-based, and that was built into our fundraising model. It was really important for us to offset the cost. We put together a scholarship committee to make sure that we have the language and that the questions are not ostracising, that they reach the right people. We don’t have enough funds to give them a travel stipend or pay for lodging, but we’re going to provide them with a kit, like if they need to do a GoFundMe or if they need to ask their boss for support, here’s copy, here’s assets, just take it and go.

Their scholarships cover the whole weekend of education and food and local transportation, and I’m hoping next year we’ll be able to raise even more money and offset that some more.

And for the non-scholarship tickets they’re only $300 and we wrapped lodging into that so we could all stay in the same place. When you go to [SCA’s annual coffee conference] Expo you sort of miss each other, there’s all these different parties happening. I want it to be an event that is of value and is fun—on the Friday when people are getting to the hotel, Eric Grimm and maybe Jackson O’Brien are hopefully going to host either a movie or music video night in our event room at the hotel, just to set the tone. We'll have intentional in between times. It's not just class.

To finish up, can you give me your thoughts on the current state of barista education in the industry, and maybe put Level Up into the context of similar events in the past like Barista Camp?
I think [education] is shop dependent. There’s places online for people to go, there’s YouTube, Instagram, but it’s all self-driven, self-motivated, and otherwise I think you have to be part of a company that has a strong barista education programme.

We were definitely inspired by Barista Camp, and we’ve talked about how there’s not really spaces to connect outside of competitions right now. I never went to Barista Camp, the stuff I went to was more like Expo or [lecture series] Tamper Tantrum. And there are some workshops, panels, lectures, but they feel a little more like baby Expo-y instead of a full immersive do-everything-together weekend which is the kind of the sleepaway camp thing we wanted to capture.

We’re inviting back in some of the people that were involved in early Barista Camps because we want to capture the fun and the play of it instead of the competition. We can have serious education without having to be so serious about it.

Level Up takes place September 27-29 at Mill City Roasters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Visit their website to find out more.