Mine started around 1990, at the Boscastle Food Shop on Gertrude Street in Fitzroy.

It was a gourmet café, and the owner, the food writer John Lethlean, was territorial about his coffee machine. New staff didn't touch it until they'd been trained. He knew exactly what his customers expected, which was proper coffee, and he wasn't going to let a newcomer gamble with it.

He taught me to make my first long black. I wasn't there long, because I soon landed my chef's apprenticeship at Rogalsky's, a fine-dining restaurant. But the lesson stuck. The machine is only as good as the training of the person standing at it.

That's the thinking behind the Mahalia Coffee Barista Training Manual. It's the manual we use to train baristas, and for the first time it's available to anyone.

What's inside

  • A house recipe you can use. Dose weighed in grams, with extraction read by volume in a graduated glass, plus how to program your machine's volumetric buttons to match.
  • A full Mazzer Kony grinder guide. It covers the interface, setting and changing a dose, every menu option and fork calibration, with a reference section for Compak grinders.
  • Flat vs conical burrs and burr wear, in plain language, so you understand why your grinder behaves the way it does.
  • Milk texturing, tamping, channelling and extraction theory, including current milk temperatures and how to read a shot when something's off.
  • Five house serving styles, from short black to café latte, each with the right vessel and build.
  • Signature drinks: chai, matcha, cold foam (milk-only and sweet cream) and flavoured lattes, with recipes and a consistent scoop-per-cup-size rule.
  • Daily maintenance, backflushing and a troubleshooting quick reference for the questions that come up mid-shift.

Why consistency is the whole point

A customer should get the same drink no matter who's on the machine. That means fixed doses, fixed ratios and fixed shot counts per cup size. It's the difference between a café people order from without thinking twice, and one where regulars ask who's on before they order.

"Everything that follows is designed to give you the knowledge, not just the steps, so that once your training is finished, you can adapt to any bean, any machine, and any busy Saturday morning service."

Who it's for

It's built as a companion to in-person training but works on its own too. Use it to onboard a new team, brush up your own fundamentals, or understand what separates a good flat white from a great one. If you're weighing up whether training is worth the time, read our post on the real cost of staff turnover in cafés.

Get your copy

The manual is an instant PDF download for $10 AUD, delivered straight after checkout.