Specialty coffee often appears in the hallowed pantheon The best chef. America’s most popular cooking competition show featured Stumptown in Season 18, Colectivo in Season 21, and a thrilling homemade espresso moment in this season’s highlight (#23), which even featured the WDT tool. But this season was the caffeine peak: For the first time in Top Chef history, a featured chef proudly announced that he was barista master!
The statement came during episode 10 of “Hook, Line and Dinner,” which aired last week. It features chef Duyen Ha – the founder Cuisson culinary studio and French wine brand Feed them— stated that she is an extremely competitive person and presented as evidence, among other things, that she is a champion barista. Here’s the clip:
It’s even written on it Biography of the best chef at Food & Wine: “After working in the tech industry and becoming a master barista [Chef Ha] “She focused on culinary arts and studied at the prestigious French culinary school Ferrandi Paris, where she graduated at the top of her class.”
Watching it live, my ears perked up when Chef Ha stated. Sprudge has been involved in the Barista Championship for 15 years and I have personally been a part of the team for over ten years; I don’t remember her name, but we’ve covered thousands of competitors at this point and memory may be fuzzy. Really excited about this huge TV moment for barista competitors, I dug into Sprudge’s massive archives to learn more and celebrate the incredible journey of barista champion Duyen Ha.
The first thing I did was search for Duyen Ha on both Sprudge.com and Sprudgelive.com, which together constitute the most right record of the United States Barista Championship and the World Barista Championship in the known universe. No search results were returned for Duyen Ha. But the USBC isn’t the only coffee championship around, and Sprudge’s archives didn’t really start to be reliable until around 2012, so the search expanded. Maybe it was a regional event or another US Coffee Championship or Latte Art winning at Coffee Fest? Maybe she won the Recent York Coffee Masters, Crush the Rush, or some other distant success in coffee competition.
But I couldn’t find anything. Even a plain Google search for “Duyen Ha coffee” yielded no insight or details.
It’s weird, but not *that* weird. Specialty coffee culture has long thrived on the fringes of polite society. Custom events, sprodeos, Latte Art Bracket Challenges and the like are a must-have for coffee and often take the form of small-scale events with no paper trail or promotional history. And any online record of coffee culture from 2000 to 2012 is shoddy at best.
There was one clue, however. On her LinkedInmaster barista Ha listed her as one of her previous employers Think about coffeea Brooklyn-based specialty coffee roastery and café for which she worked from July 2012 to April 2013 (interning in 2011). According to Ha’s resume, her job list includes wholesale account manager and farmer relations representative, whose responsibilities included leading weekly educational coffee tastings at Think’s Chelsea coffee shop in Manhattan. This role means more than just a passing knowledge of specialty coffee; in 2012, while Chef Ha was featured on Think, Recent York barista Katie Carguilo won the United States Barista Championship, which was met with great attention at outlets such as New York Times, New York Public RadioAND Slate. During this time, barista competitions began to gain popularity, especially in Recent York, where Chef Ha worked in the industry.
We reached out to master barista Duyen Ha to ask more about her trajectory as a barista competitor. Was it like the 2007 NERBC victory or something, lost to time and archival records? But we never got an answer. We also asked Think if anyone remembered the event. “I didn’t make it, I’m sorry.”
After countless hours of scouring aged forum posts, Barista Exchange threads, and Flickr photo sets, we discovered the truth… in a podcast. Maximum fun Chef Fantasy League TV Podcastthe answer we expected was in the 29th minute.
The hosts were discussing a given episode of Top Chef and the same suggestion was made by the master barista. It turns out that series engineer Gabe Mara actually worked with Ha at Think. Here’s what he had to say:
I don’t want to second-guess any barista competitions she hosted, but we did occasionally host barista competitions at the 14th Street location, and I think Duyen fucking nailed it – it seemed like we had coffee at four to five locations, so it wasn’t nothing – at least 40 people would have attended that event.
Boom. Barista champion Duyen Ha crushed the internal barista competition 15 years ago.
Which made us think. As you may have noticed before, we called Sprudge and Sprudgelive “the most right record of the United States Barista Championships and World Barista Championships in the known universe,” and indeed it is. But considering all this, it seems a little less than comprehensive.
How many thousands of master baristas exist outside of the established context, have we completely missed them all these years? Every latte art meeting, every internal cupping triangulation, every Saturday Sprodeo throughout the company. Master baristas as far as the eye can see. We failed them, the master baristas, and we failed you, the readers.
That’s why we’re introducing a fresh initiative. Introducing the Barista Championship Database, a user-generated compendium of knowledge about barista champions from around the world. Have you won any competitions, throws, sprodeo or cupping triangulation?
Simply fill out the form (straightforward answers only please) and officially register as the legitimate master barista that you are. To recognize your great achievement in successfully completing the form, Sprudge will honor you with an official badge, officially confirming your full and rightful status as a Master Barista.
We are all barista champions. We forgot about it along the way and master barista Duyen Ha reminded us about it. You are a master barista too. And at least someday you’ll add your name to the hallowed halls of the Barista Championship database. Join now!
