The Coffee Man

I don’t think I’ll ever have a perfect cup of coffee.

It can exist for a moment. Well I think this is best

espresso I’ve ever tasted.

After few days, after few weeks

you want more.

You just keep chasing that perfection over and over again.

You wake up in the morning and you just say,

I love what I do. I’m not perfect at it.

I'll never be. I want to make it better.

When Sasa is getting ready for comp, he doesn’t

eat, he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t do anything,

but coffee.

You could hear him practicing his speech.

Last four years as a barista and a coffee buyer.

the first sip it’s all about the creamy mouthful.

The amount of training he went through, that was insane.

Now I need to stop talking to everyone for

two hours so I can have my voice.

Welcome back to the 2015 World Barista Championships

here in Seattle.

It is with great pleasure I announce the next competitor

Mr Sasa Sestic.

We are in Ethiopia.

And we’re gonna do some cupping.

Cupping is wine tasting for coffee.

I've tasted this coffee six years ago,

first time.

And I've tasted blueberries, raspberries & blackcurrants.

yeah, it made me crazy. It made me fly

to Melbourne, in a coffee shop that was serving

that coffee, just to taste it again. So I found it was blueberries.

Suddenly coffee didn’t taste bitter anymore,

and first time in life tasted fruity, and got me obsessed with it.

And last year I found one of these coffee trees and I just

gave it a big kiss and a big hug, and it’s yeah.

Amazing apricots.

And honey.

I must say, this is one of the most intense

coffee trips I’ve done, being in Ethiopia

for ten days.

We’ve spent about eight and a half hours in a car every single day.

and the driver needs to concentrate. Like, there’s animals coming out.

People are like just on the side of the road,

literally, half a metre from the car.

We even saw tornado

The locals call them dust devils.

Let’s go in the forest.

I’m looking for cherries, that’s where coffee beans come from.

But I want to find some really nice red ones.

So, what you do is, just open it up here a little bit

And just suck it in.

Then try to collect as much juice as possible.

And that slimy stuff there, that’s mucilage.

That’s the sweetness in the coffee.

Good indication to see when cherries are ready

to be picked, you wanna see two to three drips.

Ah... three.

I was looking forward to come here for last

year and a half and meet people behind the scene

and why their coffee is tasting as it is.

They’re beautiful.

Very big as well.

Can we look at taking some samples of them?

Yeah.

I have not seen this before in Ethiopia.

They’ve done amazing job picking at this

farm – we expect some really nice fruity,

floral flavours out of these big, bad cherries.

I’m like a kid, in a lolly shop holding his lollies. Super-excited.

My wife is gonna kill me.

I promised I’m gonna buy only one, but looks like I’m

gonna end up with three containers from Ethiopia.

Shit!

You can smell raisins hey.

We’ve changed, hotels, regions, every second day as well.

12 hours in a car in a very awkward position

it wasn’t fun. Sometimes I think coffee

is not worth this pain.

Plus, we’ve been able to cup two, three hundred coffees.

So Bonga is sort of there.

Yes. Bonga is around here, it may be.

So we’re going there.

“We’re going to Bonga because I’ve heard

of this wild coffee trees in Geisha forest.”

“Few people have seen them.”

What’s the plan? I would really love to see wild coffee.

if people wanna chill out and I need to jump in a car and go,

like, I have to see

wild coffee while I’m in Ethiopia.

So then you just jump in a car.

Or we’re gonna go on a walk and, and machete or whatever we need to do.

Half an hour he can sit on the tractor.

I can sit on the tractor for two hours, three hours. I don't care.

We were sitting at the back of the old tractor

and just going through the forest.

We’ve got a guy with a rifle, in case of lions.

Stop!

We spotted some of these really wild trees,

untouched, it’s a virgin forest.

Not the red.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It’s pretty close, but that’s not it.

We’ve come at the wrong time of the year

and cherries are over-ripe and old.

And that made me feel very unhappy and a little bit depressed.

It’s impossible for us to find a cherry now.

Yes, it’s impossible, it’s impossible.

That is something that’s very rare to find it.

It’s a wild, it’s a natural coffee tree

and it would be awesome to have a sample of

that and collect the seeds and see what it tastes like.

And if it tastes good, try to spread it throughout the world.

Ah! We can go home now, I’m pissed.

The tractor’s broken down.

So it looks like it’s gonna be a nice long walk for us.

High. We are very high.

Very high.

We are going up and up.

We were going back from a forest.

We heard a noise and there was this group of people

just coming towards to us, singing, dressed in all these awesome colours.

They had this really, very special dance.

And I thought, “I can do this”.

So I joined them.

We are in Canberra, capital city of Australia.

This is my favourite part

there’s really nice restaurants in there.

This is where I’ve done my hospitality diploma.

And this is where I made my very first coffee.

We were sort of putting a lot of froth in the cappuccinos.

These days we will call them mountain-chinos.

It takes time to get used to this place because it’s really quiet.

But in Canberra is where I met my wife.

It's where I had my kids,

my parents live here.

And in Canberra is where I got opportunity to fulfil my dream.

My vision for specialty coffee.

He’s very obsessed with coffee.

His coffee vocabulary is better than his actual vocabulary

most of the time.

Looking at my accent people would know you’re

not from Canberra and no I’m not, you know?

I was born in Banja Luka which is in Bosnia.

Completely different to what my kids grew up in Australia.

Of course, computers did not exist and video games.

I had my little gang where I was the leader of my little pack.

All Day in the streets he's playing basketball, soccer, handball

I’d try to bring people who can play in a team as well and lets play

soccer or next month were going to play athletics.

My wife go behind him and put food in mouth

Hi didn't have time to go into the house to eat

So I would have probably all my meals outside.

Any brother relationship that is four years apart it was

a lot of fighting.

All initiated by him.

When he was a child he always made trouble.

My grandma for example would keep her eggs

on the balcony outside and I’ll just get

the eggs and I’ll see postman on bike and

I’ll just you know, chuck some eggs on him

as well. I was creative hey.

Trouble maker.

Well he was always full of love for me and parents and

everyone thought just little bit too much energy.

He things he can go through a wall.

Then war started in Slovenia and Croatia.

I remember being a kid like we had no electricity

for 8 for 6, 7, 8 months.

There was this army airplanes going above

you 10 meters and you’d sort of need to

go to the ground because they’re so noisy.

Everyday scenery was tanks and soldiers and bombs.

We did not really want to take a part of any of the sides,

because my mum’s side is Muslim and my dad’s side is Orthodox.

So we moved to Serbia.

We were lucky now that my brother was very good handball player.

Handball is very big in Europe. It’s non-stop, it’s very physical.

There’s a lot of body to body contact.

I always pulled by brother with me and you know,

he was always joined to our senior team or professional teams.

We wanted to be best sports people we possibly could,

the best handball players.

But then political situation in Serbia was

getting worse and worse.

We finally decided that we need to leave.

At that time we couldn’t wait to get out.

We moved to Australia February 1996.

I think that Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, that

was very tempting for us, ahh it’s a dream

of any sportsman to be part of Olympic Games,

And we managed to get a visa.

When we arrived in Melbourne it was different planet for us.

All you think, how do I fit here? It was hard.

We didn’t have skill to work, to support us, neither my parents did.

Our biggest problem when we came to Australia was English

we didn't know any English words.

My parents have decided from Melbourne to move to Canberra.

We have a family relative that

has decided to help them out, providing a house.

For me Canberra worked very well because we