Pete Licata, chief barista at the Honolulu Coffee Company, says of his job: “It’s kind of like being a bartender, but you’re in the morning and you’re getting people over their hangover instead of giving it to them…the anti-bartender.” He does more than administer a cup of hangover remedy, though. He recently won the Western Regional United States Barista Competition, making him the first Hawaii barista to win and the first barista to win using 100 percent Hawaii-grown coffee. The Weekly sat down with Licata to ask what goes into a winning cup of espresso and how it all translates into a cup that has coffee geeks wired on flavor as much as caffeine.

What was the Hawaii-grown coffee you used in the competition?

It was a blend of Hawaii coffees…a blend of Kona coffees and Maui coffees.

How did you come up with the blend?

A friend of mine in Kona…he’d give me some samples, I’d try them, give him some feedback, and he’d try new things. And we kind of went back and forth several times to try to come up with the actual coffee itself.

What are you looking for in a competition blend?

You want something that tastes good, more than anything…you want it to be sweet, you want it to have a really nice body and nice mouth-feel to it. You want it to have some complexities, some acids and different things in it that people can taste. And you want to have a story behind it.

What’s the story?

The story of working with coffees from the ground up. Honestly, it’s something really exceptional in America because nobody’s ever done it before: being able to literally work on the farm, with the farmers and put together an espresso blend specifically for the competition. And so I kind of delved into that idea. How we got the flavors that they’re tasting and why they’re tasting what they are, through the processes of the coffee. Just coffee nerd stuff. You know, a lot of really in-depth [stuff] into the nuances of what it is.

Part of the competition is also a signature drink–what was yours?

It was kind of a drink-and-food pairing kind of thing. I made a drink that was my espresso, with ice cream and maple syrup. So it was an espresso affogato. And then I had basically a little tiny bite that was for the judges to eat in conjunction with that. [It was] candied bacon that I had soaked in maple syrup and sea salt and candied so it’s kind of crunchy, and I topped it with chocolate. The kind of salty sweet, the fat from the bacon, and the texture of the chocolate all came in together with the flavor of the espresso drink and made this really nice balanced flavor experience.

We’ve heard your coffee drinks are amazing. What is it that makes your technique unique?

[There are] little refinements in the preparation process. With the coffee and espresso especially, every single little detail you can imagine goes into the end flavor…I couldn’t tell you right off the bat the one thing I’m doing that no one else is doing, but I will say that, not to sound big-headed or anything, that I have several years of experience refining for competition where people are literally scrutinizing every little thing that you do and the flavor that you’re putting in the coffee.

Little things like if you let the water run through [the coffee] a little bit too long, then you can actually just get too many flavors out of it, more than what you want. After you’ve gotten the good flavors out of it, you tend to start pulling out bad flavors from the espresso…Milk steaming is a really big thing. If you don’t texture it (producing the little tiny bubbles in the cappuccino), that’s an indicator also of the flavor of that milk. [It should] taste sweet, creamy, pleasant overall. If you don’t texture it right, if you steam it too hot, if you do one little thing wrong, you might scald the milk and that might kind of affect the flavor. So when someone’s doing all those things right, you get this great drink experience.

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