March Madness may be over a month away, but Bloomingtonians can still entertain themselves with a bracket-style competition, albeit one that involves more coffee than basketball.
The Soma Showdown will be a head-to-head competition showcasing local baristas’ best latte art. It will kick off at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Soma Coffeehouse and Juice Bar on Kirkwood Avenue. The event is open to the public.
“We're really big latte art people here,” Lucy Pendergast, assistant manager at the Kirkwood Soma said. “We really pride ourselves on getting better with it, practicing more.”
Pendergast’s general manager had the idea for a latte art competition, brought it up with Soma’s events coordinator, and the Battle of the Baristas took off from there.
Pendergast helped distribute flyers to other Bloomington coffee shops such as The Inkwell Bakery & Cafe, Brightside Cafe and Needmore Coffee Roasters, among others. At least 15 baristas have registered for the competition.
Competitors must be current baristas, and they can register by scanning a QR code found on Soma’s Instagram page and on the flyers that Pendergast handed out. Prizes include gift cards and merchandise from various Bloomington coffee shops.
Abe Carney, one of the owners of Brightside Cafe and a judge in the showdown, thinks the competition will give baristas, especially the ones who are students, a place to come together and have fun.
“I think that it's a pretty amazing idea, mainly because we rely on the college students to, you know, run our shops and our businesses,” Carney said.
Carney said that the competition will be an opportunity for baristas to show off a skill that doesn’t always get noticed.
“They have the audience where people will like, be able to understand, you know, how much work goes into making the swan or all the other things,” Carney said.
Common latte art shapes include hearts and tulips. Swans are more advanced designs, Pendergast said.
During the showdown, participants will have two minutes to create the best latte art they can. Within that period, they will get two tries. Each round will consist of two baristas facing off, and the one with the highest score will advance to the next round.
Judges will evaluate each work and assign points based on five qualities: symmetry, clarity of the design, consistency of the steamed milk, difficulty of the design and overall impression.
“(Latte art is) so complicated,” Pendergast said. “You have to get your milk perfectly steamed. You have to let enough air into it. You have to get the right temperature. You have to pour your milk a certain way. There's just a lot of different things. And for it to look nice, you have to, like, check everything off; you have to get all the boxes checked.”
Two of the factors that Pendergast identified—aeration and milk-pouring — were also pointed out by Quill Espiritu, a shift lead at the Soma on Kirkwood.
“If you pour too fast or too high, it gets wibbly wobbly,” Espiritu said. “If you pour too fast, (the design) gets muddy, and the lines aren’t crisp and white.”
Similarly, putting too much air into steamed milk makes it harder to control. Carney gave an illustration for what the consistency of the milk should be.
“You want to get it to look like wet paint,” he said. “It's got to be not too foamy because then it takes up too much of the cup, but just the right amount where you can get the difference between the white and the espresso. Then basically a lot of it is hand motion and patience and burning or ruining a lot of milk (while you practice).”
Pendergast said the difficulty of latte art means perfecting it takes a lot of time.
“But we focus a lot on that here, like really perfecting like the aesthetic of coffee,” Pendergast said.
