2nd Grader Wins Barista Competition, Dreams Of Supporting Coffee Farmers – CoffeeTalk

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Shunsuke Ozawa, an eight-year-old Japanese second-grader, won a barista competition for university students and now sells custom-made blends of beans under his own brand. Despite making mistakes at multiplying, through precise extraction, the boy reportedly wowed coffee connoisseurs with his specialty honey latte. In the fall of 2022, Shunsuke’s mother ordered a honey latte for him at a cafe in Tokyo’s Koto Ward as his first-ever taste of coffee. The next month, on another visit, Shunsuke had the same drink but this time, it was “more bitter than before.”

The owner, 37-year-old Akira Nakadate, was taken aback by the mistake, and the boy realized that he understood flavor. He started studying its history and methods of preparation while looking to Nakadate as his mentor.

A certain mistake led Shunsuke out on the road to being a barista, not merely a coffee-lover. At the behest of a regular customer at Nakadate’s cafe, the boy extracted a blend but accidentally poured in too much hot water. Nakadate recalled that this was a fatal mistake, and Shunsuke started keeping a coffee diary. In its first page, he wrote using hiragana phonetic characters, “The flavor was bland. It was not tasty. I didn’t want anyone to drink that.”

Shunsuke got the hang of dry roasting by using the equipment at specialty shops. He kept in mind advice from Nakadate that coffee flavors appear “in the order of acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and stringency” during extraction. Last year, he emerged victorious against 11 contestants in the University Brewers Cup in Yokohama, which has granted him the right to prove his mettle at a coffee exhibition in the same city this May.

So far, Shunsuke has served his coffee to customers at a “time-limited store” set up in a cafe on four occasions, to great applause. To his mother Manami, Shunsuke is nothing more than a typical elementary schooler who likes Mario Kart and model trains. He sometimes messes up when it comes to multiplying by eight but can easily do the math to weigh beans for the sake of mastering the art of coffee.

Shunsuke also displays handmade signs at related events, writing notes about places where the beans are grown, such as Indonesia and China’s Yunnan province, introducing the growers along with maps and information about the social landscape in those areas. He wants to protect producers by improving wages at coffee farms around the world and pass on the recipes his mentor taught him to his proteges and spread tasty coffee to more people.

Read More @ Mainichi

Source: Coffee Talk

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