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What are the considerations for The Tea Chal-
lenge session? How do you see the relationship
between coffee and tea?
We see The Barista League as a competition about
Baristas and the skills that they need to do their job.
This includes tea, chai, hot chocolate, doing dishes,
handling customers and all of the other stuff that a
barista has to do. This is why we include non cof-
fee-based drinks into our competition. Tea is fasci-
nating and we have found that whenever we include
a tea round into the event, especially when it is
paired with any form of education about tea, it has
been super popular.

You have mentioned that when holding events in
the US, “It was a bit more of a prepared and com-
petitive approach than in Europe. ” How do you
see this phenomenon?
I’m not sure this is still true anymore. It is super in-
teresting to see how competitors in different cities
compete, but now I don’t think I could say that Europe
is more prepared and competitive than the US. We
definitely see a difference between those cities who
have a long-established specialty scene (like Oslo or
Melbourne or Portland) and a city whose scene is still
expanding and developing. There are differences in
the way the baristas compete, the level of enthusiasm
and the way that the community sees events, but I
don’t want to generalize so I would just say that you
have to come and see them all to see the differences.

How much time do you spend preparing for the
event during the year? What do you do the rest
of the time?
This year we are doing more than 17 events, which
means at least one every month over the course of the
year. We of course have a killer team of project man-
agers, communicators, designers and more – so it is a
team effort to make it all happen. Because of that are
always pretty busy, but to balance it out we are pretty
strict on not working after 5pm or on weekends and
we close the office each year for a few weeks to give
everyone a chance to have a proper vacation.

On a practical level, we produce the bulk of the event
about 2-3 months before it happens. That is taken care
of by our project managers. I am working a bit more
ahead of time booking the next year’s events and
managing the long-term relationships and putting
things in place for the rest of the team to take over as
we get closer to the date.

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