Junior
Junior - Founder / Roaster / Barista at Rookie’s Coffee Shop
Junior is the 2019 Singapore AeroPress Champion. It is a coffee brewing championship; though competitive by nature, it is by no means as formal and serious as its counterparts like the National Barista/ Brewer Championship.
As the World AeroPress Championship says it best, “It is a competition that is about building community, making friends, and celebrating coffee. At its heart, the WAC exists to bring coffee-loving people together in an open, inclusive, and fun environment."
It was precisely through the opportunity to visit London for the World AeroPress Championship that Junior’s view towards the coffee profession changed. The event provided Junior with a platform to meet with representatives of diverse backgrounds from around the world, and it was through that priceless experience in London we saw Junior, who was a part-time barista, decide to pursue a full-time career in coffee.
Junior began his coffee career with The Community and now defunct Nexus Coffee back in 2018 as a part-timer. Coming into the industry with no F&B experience and zero technical know-how for coffee making, much of Junior’s foundational barista skills and knowledge were picked up from his first barista jobs. Junior also joined Kurasu during the same period before converting, dedicating full-time in late 2020 before leaving for Little Big Coffee Roasters in mid-2021.
It had been a fulfilling experience working in the different coffee shops because it broadened Junior’s perspective and gave him the opportunity to look through the lens of how other coffee shop owner operated their business, the system they had in place, and their vision and approach towards coffee. However, as with many baristas before him, there would come a time when they would decide they wanted to have a space of their own where they could put forth and present their values and interpretation of coffee. For Junior, it meant the birth of Rookie’s Coffee Shop in Jan 2022!
Rookie’s is an intimate, almost hole-in-the-wall kind of coffee shop, with its design largely reflecting Junior’s personal coffee experiences in Kyoto and Singapore. He recounts the experiences being “very casual and didn’t fit the bill with some of the usual coffee shops that may come off as ‘clinical’”. Rookie’s was intended to come off as an environment that gave him the privilege to have a space to work with amazing ingredients (coffee) while also being a coffee shop that is approachable and inviting for people all over.
For Junior, Rookie’s provided him a platform where he was able to do things that mattered to him as a coffee professional: deliver an uplifting service experience for anyone who came by and express his personal interpretation of coffee.
Without romanticising too much the role of a barista, we all know how things can become repetitive after an extended time behind the coffee bar. This may not necessarily be viewed as a bad thing because “the process should indeed become something very mechanical, something that is second nature”, suggesting proficiency in the craft.
If you feel that your growth is stagnant, that is perhaps the time when you’d look into the details of the entire process of coffee making. Junior would use the analogy of fine-tuning a musical instrument- there’d always be something that can be tweaked and improved.
“Joining competitions is a good way to test yourself and grow as a professional. It brings together a team of people who will question your approach and be critical of the way you do certain things. Joining the business side of things (which is a diverse range of roles from roasting, training, greens trading to name a few) is another way to grow professionally.
I am doing a co-roasting program with Marg from Puck Provisions at the moment where I am learning how to roast my own beans for the espresso. Roasting allows me to express coffee through my personal interpretation.”
Competition and roasting are something in Junior’s pipeline. It has been a very exciting career for Junior in these 4 years, and it is inspiring to see the continuous growth of a fellow peer in the industry, especially when you learn of how they push through each stage of their career.
Author’s note: Written for A Coffee Talk by Ker You Quan
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CpjoNNbvAhg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
