Member Spotlight: An Interview with Sergio Barbarisi
/By Hylan Joseph
Sergio Barbarisi can talk about water. He teaches about water too and he manages to keep it interesting. I first met Sergio at our Houston event. His water seminar was fascinating. What I enjoyed about it was he was able to make the material, that has the potential to put you to sleep, accessible. It’s truly a skill to be able to do that. Water is a key component of our future in the tech service industry, I reached out to him to ask him what does a tech need to know about water and where might our future lie with it.
Hylan Joseph: What’s your background? Give us a short history.
Sergio Barbarisi: After “classical studies” (latin, greek, and history) and law studies, I decided to follow the “sales career” starting with a job in a company organizing events and trade shows, particularly in the furniture market. Then, exactly when the “mountain bike phenomenon” exploded in Italy in 1988 I’ve been responsible for the sales in Northern Italy for the Californian brand Specialized. 1990 is when my activities inside the coffee industry started, working for Necta Vending, then for Wittenborg, both manufacturers of vending machines. In 1999 I’ve started up the operations of Brita in Italy, then in 2006 I’ve been appointed General Manager of BWT in Italy.
HJ: Water in an intricate part of the coffee industry, can you speak to how your company supports the industry?
SB: No doubt that nowadays water is one of the most discussed topics in the coffee industry, BWT manufactures water treatment systems for each and every market using water for a specific purpose, from bottling plants to pharma industries, from heating elements protection to swimming pools, from household applications to coffee shops and restaurants. Coffee is very delicate when it comes to the water that is used to brew it, we recognized this immediately and provided for a number of different water filtration systems to be used in accordance with the quality of the local water and with the quality request in terms of coffee in the cup
HJ: What brought you to the coffee/water industry?
SB: I am born in Bergamo, Italy, where the two biggest vending machines’ manufacturers have their HQ, namely Evoca (former N&W) and Bianchi Industry, and my first “real job” has been at N&W as sales account in the Italian market.
HJ: What made you chose your career path, why water?
SB: After a two-year work experience in Wittenborg, in 1999 Brita was in search of a person who could open the Italian subsidiary, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve opened the “filtration cartridge market” that wasn’t existing in Italy in those times, then in 2006 together with a team of Friends all of them colleagues in Brita, we opened the “Horeca filtration branch” inside BWT with the name of “BWT Water+More”
HJ: Where do you see the coffee industry going in the next five to ten years?
SB: Geographically speaking I see it going more and more eastbound, in China, there are potential numbers that we don’t even imagine even if we try. Talking specifically about technology I see more and more the growth of the fully automatic machines, especially inside offices where the workers, inside a relaxation area, could benefit of a good coffee cup. Today there are fully automatic machines brewing perfect filter coffee and they are getting better and better every day with espresso and cappuccino as well
HJ: What knowledge base does a service tech need to understand water in the coffee/espresso environment?
SB: A good coffee technician today has got to know that water is a basic fundamental for a good cup of coffee and behave consequently. To know some basic chemistry, really basic, to test alkalinity (this is the most important one), total hardness, chlorides’ content are obligatory passages that allow you to suggest the correct filtration equipment including the correct machine and why not, the correct coffee beans
HJ: What do you consider to be significant events in the coffee industry in the last ten years?
SB: Talking about water, for sure the book written by Maxwell Colonna Dashwood and Chris Hendon is a milestone, followed by the SCA book on the same topic born as deeper research and as a simplification in order to make everybody able to understand. If I’m allowed to extend the period of evaluation, I would add the massive arrival of the specialty coffee industry in Europe and the separate brewing temperature and pressure on espresso machines
HJ: What was your first job?
SB: I don’t remember if the real first one, during my studies, was barista or waiter in a coffee bar…
HJ: What’s your customer service philosophy?
SB: Listen, listen, then listen again. Customers don’t have time to lose, it’s important to shoot a sure shot especially when you have a wide range of products like we do.
HJ: What are your top five go-to tools for performing service/water analysis and why?
SB: Total hardness test, alkalinity test, chlorides test, a TDS meter, and a pH meter, each one has its importance in the evaluation of the solution for the customer
HJ: What advice would you give a tech who wants to learn about water?
SB: Follow one of our trainings, then read the books, then when he has enough confusion in his head return to our training for the “final treatment”
HJ: Why have chloramines/chlorides become such a topic in the coffee industry, can you explain what they are and how they affect the equipment?
SB: We must make a distinction between the two, even if the two names make them seem to have much in common. Chloramines are chlorine-based disinfectants, all the advanced nations use disinfectants inside their drinking water in order to guarantee a low number of bacteria, the lowest possible. Chlorides instead are the shortened definition of a chemical compound, typically the Sodium Chloride or sea salt, sometimes found inside drinking water because of many reasons (the area is close to the seaside, or chlorides are used in wintertime to keep the roads from icing). The first one, the disinfectant, is an oxidant and destroys the quality of our coffee, the last instead is very dangerous for the health of the machines being the chlorides very corrosive towards the stainless-steel welding points and the metals in general.
HJ: What’s the best way to train a tech to taste coffee and tell what a defect is? Is it important that the tech taste the water when servicing the system?
SB: To taste the water, if we mean to sip the water and try to understand if it’s ok, it’s a loss of time, I challenge anybody to taste the differences between different waters without making mistakes. If we mean instead to perform a full test, it’s a necessary habit that everybody should perform if we want to have “next-generation technicians” in our market.
To taste the coffee instead it is necessary in order to create a common point of contact with the owner of the shop, and in case the result in cup is far from the expectations then the technician can modify the settings of the water treatment systems or in critical situations, he can change the system for a better performing one. In this case, I would strongly recommend SCA training courses, particularly the Sensory.
HJ: Are there "best practices" in treating chloramines and chlorides?
SB: Chlorine and chloramine are treated passing the water inside active carbon cartridges, such as the BWT Best taste or the Everpure 4C. Chlorides can only be treated by means of a good reverse osmosis, then depending on the amount of chlorides in the tap water you can decide to open the bypass just a little bit in order to recover some hardness and brew a good coffee (and some chlorides, but just a few, pass as well) or if the chlorides in the tap water are too many then it’s better to keep the bypass closed and work with a remineralizing cartridge.
HJ: What emerging problems with water do you see in the coming years for the coffee industry?
SB: If it goes on like it’s going lately, and if it’s true what they say with our future with higher average temperatures, the lack of water in the surface reservoirs and the decreasing level of the ground waters, all of this will bring to lower quality of water supply with high hardness. Thus, more technical breakdowns unless the water is correctly softened or treated in other ways.