2006 3rd Place United States Barista Championship

2006 2nd Place Great Lakes Region Barista Championship

2005 6th Place United States Barista Championship

2005 2nd Place Great Lakes Region Barista Championship

I grew up in the beautiful state of Montana and moved to Chicago about five years ago.  I started at Intelligentsia Coffee in the summer of 2002 as a Barista at our Broadway Café.  When I started I had no coffee experience, in fact I didn't even really drink coffee.  But Intelligentsia tends to seek out people with passion and people who want to work hard, and I suppose I fell into those two categories. 

A couple of months into working at our Broadway location, we started the process of opening our second café, the lovely Monadnock Café.  At that time, the training department opened up two spots; Matt Riddle and I joined Ellie Matuszak to form the original Training Dept.  I helped train our new Monadnock staff and focused primarily on retail training as I began to learn more and more about coffee and the art of being a Barista. 

About two years ago, Ellie and I started getting involved with Barista Competitions when we trained with Fritz Storm, the 2002 World Barista Champion, in Denmark.  Our competing process began, yet little did we know just how much we had to learn.  We formed our Intelligentsia Barista Team and we luckily took five competitors to both the 2005 USBC and the 2006 USBC.  Both years, we had all five competitors in the semi-finals and three in the top six finals.  I am very proud of our team and how we work together to be successful. 

Currently at Intelligentsia, I focus on our retail training at our cafes and I just helped open and train a brand new staff for our newest café, the beautiful Millennium Park Intelligentsia. 

Being a Barista is hard work if you want to get it right, yet continue to always learn and evolve.  I am lucky because I've gotten to learn through traveling to origin countries like Guatemala and Colombia, and also through meeting amazing people in the specialty coffee industry. 

POSTED: Sunday, May 21, 2006