Our second speaker at the Barista Guild of Europe’s CoLab event is a familiar face to those on the competition circuit: Erna Tosberg, a barista and trainer working for roestbar Munster, represented Germany at the 2014 WBC. A passionate advocate for coffee education, she was also involved in the first-ever Barista Camp (Athens, 2014) as an AST and is responsible for Kaffeschule Munster, a coffee school associated with roestbar: “because the more people know about coffee as a product, the more they will appreciate high-quality coffee.”

In her talk, Erna poses a question that frequently crops up in our community: do we need barista competitions? Walking the audience through her perspective both as a competitor and as a trainer, Erna thoughtfully explores the positives and negatives of our current competition platform and lands on a very firm answer.

You can keep up with all of Erna’s work with roestbar here and her work with kaffeschule munster here.