[ ABOVE: Ricardo Pereira with Ally Brazilian Coffee Merchants in Taylors Mill. Pereira, along with quality control and lab supervisor Alex Medina (see below), leads Ally’s office and handles grading, sampling and sales of specialty coffee. The facility is also a Specialty Coffee Association of America certified lab. ]
Upstate coffee experts Ricardo Pereira and Alex Medina are opening a specialty coffee academy to not only to give local residents a chance at a career, but to boost the region’s specialty coffee culture.
“I might go in and meet this amazing farmer and buy this amazing coffee from him, pay this amazing price … and then the barista is the one who is going to have the final touch,” said Pereira, a longtime coffee importer and current specialty coffee manager for Ally Brazilian Coffee Merchants. If that barista doesn’t brew the coffee properly, “then all that work is thrown away,” he said.
Pereira is a licensed Q grader – the coffee equivalent of a wine grand sommelier, he said – by the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a nonprofit trade organization and coffee knowledge development group. He and Medina – who also works at Ally and specialty coffee roasting company and venue Due South – plan to teach classes ranging from basic roasting and brewing to customer management and safety through the organization.
“The actual pay difference between certified and non-certified baristas, it’s a good bit,” said Medina, who began his coffee career with an eight-year stint at Coffee & Crema in Greenville. “Non-certified are getting $5,000 less per year.”
Ally’s Taylors Mill office will double as the coffee academy, equipped with gleaming espresso machines, locally crafted work tables, small-batch roasters and grinders and a separate cupping room to sample the product.
The duo say they have already been approached by several people interested in classes and certification, and Pereira said coffee companies in the area would be interested in sending their employees to the academy for certification.
“There isn’t anywhere you can go here in America, any college in America where you can get a degree in coffee,” he said. “There is this demand and there is this niche. We are super pumped about this space.”
The lab – which needs to be approved by the Specialty Coffee Association of America before classes can begin – is the first in the Upstate and one of few in the Southeast region, Pereira said. The organization records the participant’s completed classes and certifications in its database, which serves as a digital resume for baristas applying for work.
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