“Mise en Place” Your Life
In my past life as an aspiring coffee roaster, I had the opportunity to judge barista competitions a couple years in a row. This was a fascinating experience, learning so much and meeting so many great people in such a concentrated amount of time, while extremely over-caffeinated.
As a sensory judge, you’re scoring everything you can with your five senses — from smelling, tasting and feeling the drink, to listening to the barista’s story and watching the show. The categories and description of the score sheet definitely helped clarify who excelled, but it was hard to feel 100% objective, as I was limited by my own filters.
The precision of the technical judging rocked my world. Quantifying every step of each drink, using two stopwatches to measure two shot extraction times simultaneously. Some aspects you might consider sensory, particularly appearance-related, are in fact technical as there is a clearly defined standard. Are the portafilters completely clean of grinds between shots? Are the steam wands purged and wiped? These are not subjective.
One category, “station management”, made a huge impression on me. Described to me as the chef’s discipline of mise en place, French for “everything in it’s place”, basically means not being sloppy. All your tools and materials have a purpose, you know what they’re for, and you likewise have a dedicated location for them. Your towel isn’t sitting on the the top of the espresso machine, you don’t set your pitches and milk randomly on the counter — there’s an optimal spot for the next time you use them and to be out of the way in the meantime. This is technical discipline, not style.
I thought about this experience today while assembling a trailer, a project that has become quite a saga over the course of the week (from Harbor Freight, after all). While unwrapping dozens of various sizes of hardware, instead of leaving them scattered across the table as I’m wont to do, I immediately found an intentional location for each item. The experiment worked amazingly, and I even consolidated some bolts and nuts that had been hanging out randomly in the garage for the past two years. If I can apply this to all my activities, it will be like gaining a new super power…
