World Barista Champion Agnieszka Rojewska’s Signature Beverage for the 2018 WBC Competition

In June 2018, Agnieszka Rojewska successfully became the first female competitor to become World Champion.  HBC is lucky enough to be able to get her to share one of the recipes from her award-winning presentation (see that presentation here on YouTube). You can also read more about her background in our previous post, where she introduced herself. 

We have also produced a video that features Rojewska creating her Signature Beverage:  

And below, in her own words, is the process she used to create her Signature Beverage, as well as the ingredients and instructions themselves.

Creating a Signature Beverage for the World Barista Championship is not an easy task.There are few very clear rules you have to follow. For example, "use at least one full espresso in one serving portion for a judge” is fairly straightforward, but some of the others are a bit more tricky.  Trying to comply with the requirement for “synergy between coffee and ingredients or creative use of ingredients”, for instance, is tough without more details about what they're looking for. Doing it for the first time is quite a challenge.    

The 2018 WBC in Amsterdam was the third challenge like this for me. When I was thinking of my final creation, I focused on showing different aspects of my coffee with the other beverage ingredients, and that is why I chose to use:

1. Passion fruit syrop – easy to make at home. I took 1 part of passion fruit pulp (200g), ½ part of water (100g) and 1/4 part of coconut sugar (50g) – you can also use panela sugar.

I put it into sous vide bag and cooked it at 85 degrees Celsius for 3h.

I separated the seeds from the syrop – there you go – it is ready.

This ingredient highlighted natural terroir of the coffee I chose – these beans come from young Ethiopian trees in the Guji area zone at high altitude, all of which develop tropical fruit notes in the final beverage.

2. Rooibos cold brew infusion – cold brew is easy to make. Put rooibos leaves into clean cold water, leave it for 14-16h and then filter it. Rooibos tea has very high sweetness and a lot of fudge and caramel notes. With this ingredient I wanted to highlight the roasting part of the process of creating my coffee. In roasting, sugars in coffee are caramelized giving sweetness and hints of bitterness that marry well with the rooibos.
3. I also used something I called “washed milk.” My coffee has incredible tactile qualities and a lush mouthfeel, and  I wanted to keep that in my Signature Beverage. So I needed something dense, but didn’t need any more flavors. When you mix warm milk with citric acid (lime juice for example), the milk will curdle and you can separate out an almost clean, dense liquid that contains sugars and fat but will not have any milk flavors anymore. I used this process to create the exact ingredient I wanted to use. To make this process more clear: I used 100ml of warm milk and 7g of lime juice (sometimes you need to use more – depends on the lime) and then filtered it with a paper filter.
4. Coffee was the last ingredient – rules say I have to use it after all -- so I used 6 espressos, which gave me 135g of liquid coffee.

So I had my ingredients. But just mixing them by hand wasn’t good enough to get the texture I wanted. So I used a blender – the equipment allowed me to not only mix ingredients but also give extra texture thanks to adding some extra air into my Signature Beverage. As a result, it has a velvety, dense, very very pleasant texture. It always amazes me how great blender and espresso work together according to texture of the beverage.

This Signature Beverage is easy to prepare at home or a coffee shop if you prepare those ingredients listed above ahead of time. For best results, all of them have to be around room temperature (around 20 degrees Celsius).

Recipe:

• 25g of passion fruit syrop
• 10g of rooibos cold brew
• 20g of washed milk
• 135g of espresso – remember that coffee has to have hints of bright yellow fruits – Ethiopian washed coffee or Colombian washed would work perfectly!

Then, blend it for 10 seconds and enjoy. You should get flavors of peach, orange, caramel. For me it reminds a yellow fruit tart – it is very dessert-like.

If it is not sweet enough for you, feel free to add more sugar to the syrop recipe – after all, Signature Beverages in competition have to follow some rules and score sheets, but outside the competition there are no other rules than just “enjoy your drink!”

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