On a rather damp and dreary Tuesday evening towards the end of November, our entire team gathered around the counter of our Secrett’s Farm Shop café ready for a golden opportunity of a training evening – we were having a latte art masterclass with none other than Dhan Tamang.
We know that there are many coffee aficionados amongst our regulars, but let’s start by explaining a bit more about Dhan – in doing so, you’ll understand that whilst although we learnt an incredible amount from him, we didn’t quite come away from the night with skills to rival his because that would take YEARS.
Dhan Tamang is a six times UK Latte Art Champion (successively, no less) who has spent over 16 years growing a career in the coffee industry. He’s published books on latte art, runs two coffee shops in Winchester, and travels around the world consulting to help other businesses grow their coffee knowledge, blends and recipes. If your Instagram algorithms are anything like ours, it’s highly likely that you’ll have seen a couple of his coffee pouring videos on your feed, as his talents are known to go viral.
Amy and Dhan first met when they were both working for a Farnham-local coffee shop with a few outlets in the area. This was long before the Coffee Can days, and long before Dhan decided to move towards competing in coffee competitions.
With a worldwide coffee career behind him, you can quickly see why we’ll all be very quick to put our hands up and say we haven’t yet mastered our new skills to his level quite yet. Nonetheless, we had an absolute fantastic evening and began to sew the seeds for a future with a lot of latte art in it.
The evening began with a recap of the basics. These are the foundations which need to be perfected if you want to stand any chance of producing successful latte art. Before anything else, you need to have dialled in your espresso correctly. What’s the use of having a great looking coffee if it doesn’t taste exceptional? As well as affecting taste, the dialling in of an espresso changes its body and texture in the base of the cup. This is integral because a well dialled espresso essentially acts as a canvas for latte art. Secondly, you need to have your milk heated to the correct temperature and steamed to be the right texture. At the Coffee Can, we think these should be the absolute priority with any cup of coffee, and it’s what we tell our staff to focus on first before attempting any sort of latte art. However, once those are set and perfected, that’s when we say go ahead and go wild with the latte art attempts!
We looked at the three core techniques with Dhan that can then be applied to more advance patterns and styles. These are the heart, the rosetta, and the tulip. One by one, we rather sheepishly went to the coffee machine to show Dhan where we were at. There was no need to be nervous, he was incredibly supportive and great at giving advice! The jests from the rest of the team however… there was no controlling those. Some of the team who attended have been with the coffee can for just a matter of weeks. They came away from the night pouring their first ever hearts and were deservedly absolutely chuffed. Others of us progressed towards stacking tulips in the cup, whilst others made some slightly questionable attempts of swan-like looking creatures.
Dhan really kindly gifted us two copies of his book (one for Secretts, one for the Bourne Pavilion). Slowly but surely, I’m sure we will continue to progress through the rest of the book to be producing dragons, flowers, and all sorts of our own creations! So be sure to give whoever is making your coffee a bit of stick next time you pop by and make wild latte art requests… just don’t say we told you to!
