SAN FRANCISCO—Newly formed Bay Area Coffee Community (BACC) will kick off this Saturday with the start of a six-month long latte art competition ending in June.
“It’s a perfect way to celebrate the craft of coffee,” says Molly Gore of BACC. “It’s enormously entertaining, suspenseful, and whimsically outlandish if you’ve never encountered it.”
The events are open to anyone, and competition slots are now full. Thirty-two baristas will pour and continue through six rounds with a single elimination bracket, coming out with three winners at each event.
BACC was founded to facilitate a sense of community in the world of coffee—which is noticeably present in the Bay Area—and to bring sustainability to focus, according to Gore.
“The Bay Area is a promised land of innovation, gastronomic and otherwise, and when you have this many people loving what they do, it becomes an incredibly exciting atmosphere in which to share our ideas, knowledge, and passion for our respective crafts,” Gore wrote in an email.
The goal of BACC is to promote specialty coffee, and smaller local producers and roasters of the industry. Aside from the latte art contest, BACC plans to host a series of events throughout the year to create a dialogue between coffee purveyors and coffee consumers.
BACC is sponsored by a handful of coffee brands, but has a policy to not provide specific brands with exposure in exchange for sponsorship. To gain exposure, sponsors need to host an event. “We want the Bay Area Coffee Community event series to be a democratic platform where we celebrate specialty coffee and community; not cash donations,” the website reads.
The judges of each latte art competition event will be different, and no café representatives will be judging within their respective businesses.
Gore guarantees each of the six competition events to be as entertaining as the other, and a must-see for anyone who hasn’t ever been to a latte art contest. “Even if you know nothing about coffee, how can you miss a high-stakes, competitive milk-pouring competition?”
