While everything is still spinning from the morning’s Latte Art Throwdown, we’re in for another surprise with the Coffee Brewing Competition in the afternoon.
One of the realizations we had about coffee: your brewed coffee isn’t as simple as you think it is. And tasting it involves a lot of slurping. Slurp, slurp!
There were 27 participants and three varied judges, namely: Jemalyn Mallilin, Kristoffer Shem Nebrija, and Jan Michael Hipol.
All I can see is black coffee in three different cups. In a normie’s mind, ‘what’s the difference? what takes one apart from the others? what’s in it that the other cups don’t have?’
Curiosity grew more and more as I saw hands shaking with nervousness, and judges reacted to what they were tasting in front of them. Manual brewing is a whole different art and science from the latte art throwdown.
I was too focused on the participants that when I looked at the audience below the stage, I was quite amazed by how serious they are while watching the competition. In my mind, ‘Woooow, they’re so concentrated and they don’t seem bored at all‘. Melody, my backstage/sidestage companion said that if it were normies (or people who don’t really get what it is), they’d be bored and they would have left already. And I agree. And although I am one of those (at least until the Coffee Fest happened), I find the competition too interesting that I was not really bored. Believe it or not, I was holding myself back from asking a lot of questions. My mind was blowing up with tangled thoughts that resulted into silently watching than speaking because I was afraid to talk especially when my thoughts weren’t organized.
Coffee Brewing Winners:
Champion: Jeno Ray Sarapao
1st Runner-Up: Jeric Gumpic
2nd Runner-Up: Arnold Ramos
All photos are taken by b.art
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