Dale Harris: Habit of the Champion

12th Jun
Features
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Dale Harris is the new World Barista Champion of 2017. The most prestigious coffee competition of the year, the World Barista Championship, was held last November in Seoul and brought new ideas and fresh blood into the industry. Even though Dale has been competing in competitions back in UK since 2009, it is his first time competing internationally and, as a result of his hard work, winning in Seoul.

By now Dale has already held positions of BGE Chair (2014-2015) and Director of SCAE (2015-2016). Competing in Seoul, he decided to highlight the connections between our sensory experience of a coffee and the actions which shaped it at origin and it was the best strategy. Looking at his achievements, it seems that Dale has been in coffee forever. Nevertheless, he grew up in a small town in the south-west of England, which is actually the home of Clark’s shoes. Growing up, most of Dale’s family and neighbors worked for that company and his twin brother still does. It’s a rural area with lots of muddy fields and dairy herds and within the UK, which is not really associated with coffee industry. “Now, 20 years later, I think there is a Starbucks and a few places with espresso machines, but I think it is probably safer that I take an Aeropress with me when I visit my family there.”

As Dale says, in the UK, most people drink instant coffee and, as he was growing up, bringing his mum a mug of Nescafe was a part of the morning ritual. When he was 12 or 13, he began brewing coffee on a percolator and enjoying the smell and the process of freshly ground coffee. Over the next 10 years, this small thing became the main hobby hot him and led to working in coffee. While he was studying history at college, Dale began working in a shop owned by the Ben Sherman brand and, as college finished, took a full time role there. This pretty quickly lead to a national training role focused on improving service and presentation standards in stores and helping the staff to better understand the brand. “For a short time, this made me think I was pretty good at sales but later, when I moved to a different brand (Billabong) and tried to applied those skills to my new job, I realized I’m actually just really good at talking about things I like with nice people.” While he could see the quality of products even as someone who never surfed (Billabong is an activewear brand), he struggled to engage with it and it became an unhappy work for him, so he decided that whatever he did next, it would be working with something he really enjoyed and it was coffee.

Through his fellow managers in that business, Dale became aware of an opportunity to work for Costa doing training and machine care, this role allowed him the opportunity to grow, including being exposed to competition, and the beginnings of the coffee scene in London. “I worked for that company for a couple of years – they were incredibly supportive in allowing me to grow and develop, and again, I progressed pretty quickly to a head of coffee role there. But the nature of a big organizations with very commercial customers limited my ability to access good coffee.” So when a friend introduced Dale to Steve Leighton from Hasbean in 2010, he was super excited to have an opportunity to engage with better quality coffee and build a new role in a smaller company.

As he has grown in coffee, Dale has developed very specific beliefs about coffee industry, which centre mainly around building long term relationships based on quality and mutual need. and no wonder that the most exciting part of Dale’s work is people: both through the product itself and the logistical and economic situation. But Dale thinks that we still have a lot to learn, particularly around working together to solve very real issues at origin and throughout our supply chain to maximize the value for every stakeholder.

That is why he focused his presentation during WBC on connections between our sensory experience of a coffee and the actions which shaped it at origin. Talking of competitions, Dale shares that every competition he participated in thought him a lot about coffee and about himself: “It takes a little time to understand that winning is not the most important thing about competing – delivering on your vision and performing the best you can for 15 minutes is an achievement in and of itself.”

Of course it is overwhelming to be the best world barista and the victory brings along a lot of new opportunities as well as more hard work that takes time. Nevertheless, Dale still finds time for discovering new things like baking and you can clearly see it from his Instagram. What keeps him excited is being methodical and refining processes, deepening his knowledge about fermentation, baking chemistry and keeping leraning in general. For now he bakes very simple white sourdough loaves but the idea of opening his own place, with coffee of course, is always at the back of his mind. For now tight schedule and bigger responsibilities will keep him off some things, but there are still a lot of ideas on Dale’s list for “one day”. Maybe one day he will go back to school, maybe pursue a degree in agronomy, history or even chemistry. “Whilst I feel much older and slower than when I first started working in coffee, I think I still have a good 30-40 years to learn new things and have fun as I go!”

Staying hungry for knowledge, for life and meeting new people might be the best way to explain how Dale Harris became the Barista Champion. It is an ultimate key to success and Dale’s story shows that no matter where you work and what you do, there is always something to learn to use this knowledge later when pursuing your dream.