The poster designed by Andy Wickstrom
Well, that was fun. For those of you who didn’t stop by the closed Broadway on Thursday, or talked to one of the many baristas working so hard on their craft all last week, or you know, read an earlier blog post, Thursday marked the date of the Inaugural Cookie Championship: a company wide latte art throwdown . As I documented earlier, we were all striving for the gold, bettering our skills in hopes of bringing home the glory and super secret prize. And what a prize it turned out to be: a custom-made Espresso Parts tamper, with a wood handle engraved with the Black Cat Project logo and “Inaugural Cookie Championship” engraved on the tamp. Sweet.
Stephen holding the prize of the night, the custom tamper
After closing down Broadway early, a good number of the baristas made the long trek to the Loop to visit our southern siblings at the Millennium Park store. A crowd had already gathered, with coworkers from Monads, production and our hosts of Mil Park. Competitors placed their names in a bean hopper before munching on some pizza and drinking some beers, generously provided by Intelli. After some rousing speeches from Stephen Morrissey and Geoff Watts, the names of the competitors were placed into a bracket, randomly, for the one shot, one pour competition. What this means is that each person got one attempt, pull a shot, pour some art. No practice, no do-overs. Tough stuff.
Gordon squaring off against Matt Riddle
Without hesitation, the competition got underway. Each competitor poured, then placed their drink on the counter, where the incomparable Matt Riddle had rigged up a camera and projector, so that all the spectators could see the beautiful drink five feet high on the wall behind. The drink was then judged on a number of criteria by three judges: Geoff Watts, Doug Palas , and Jay Cunningham, with the big cheese Doug Zell taking over during the second round. The brackets progressed quickly, and soon, after much yelling, cheering, eating, judging and spilling, the contest was decided.
The winning shot
Amy Lawlor of Millennium Park beat out our own Adam Gaspar to take home the prize. I like to think that we are all winners here though, after all, we got to leave work early to go and have an amazing time doing what we love so much. That’s a pretty great prize just for competing.
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