Arctic Talent: Mastering the art of ‘notes,’ ‘colours’ and ‘hints’ of coffee

If you’ve ever drank an espresso at Iqaluit’s Black Heart Café, you might have noticed the coffee has a taste of cherry and almond. And maybe a hint of chocolate. Dark chocolate.

Definitely dark.

The Black Heart Café in Iqaluit uses coffee beans with a hint of cherry, almond and dark chocolate. (Photo by Arty Sarkisian)

“You can’t make it too funky — people might not like it,” says Carolina Trevino Cuellar, a barista who can taste the difference between “fresh,” “earthy” and “fruity” cups of coffee.

She says Black Heart Café uses the most classic-tasting coffee beans.

“It’s all about the palate,” adds her colleague John Dale Valencia, who uses words like “texture,” “notes” and “colours” to describe coffee.

“It’s kind of like wine,” he says.

The two have been caffeinating Iqaluit as baristas at Black Heart for a year, and recently they sat down to talk about their international coffee-flavoured careers.

2018: Valencia hates coffee-making. He has only worked part-time as a barista in college and didn’t like the tedious job of grinding, steaming and brewing.

“There’s a lot of science to it and I was just bored,” he says.

But Valencia gives it another shot and gets a full-time job as a barista in his hometown of Batangas in the Philippines.

It takes him two months before he falls in love with his new vocation.

“Maybe it was a different atmosphere or I learned more about it,” he says of his change in attitude toward coffee.

Soon, he gets a job at a coffee shop in Saudi Arabia mostly selling high-end beans to picky Saudi coffee drinkers. That’s when he learns all about notes and colours, he says.

2020: In the meantime, in the “wild of the pandemic” Trevino Cuellar decides to leave her office career of five years in transport logistics to become a barista at a coffee shop in the Mexican city of Monterrey.

Before making the career leap, she was a regular office-filter coffee drinker.

“It was an opportunity of a lifetime to switch and not go back to an office job,” she says, adding “and start drinking better coffee.”

2022: Trevino Cuellar makes the move to Iqaluit to work at Black Heart Café. She said she’d been to Iqaluit to visit a friend in 2018 and enjoyed the experience, so when she heard the café was hiring, she jumped.

Meanwhile, Valencia moves back home to the Philippines.

Valencia and his wife open their own coffee shop they call “Valencia’s” — a dream come true for the family, he says.

“It was a lot of pressure, but we love it,” Valencia says.

2024: Trevino Cuellar is invited to judge the Canadian National Barista Championship in Montreal.

“I drank a lot of coffee,” she says of the experience. “I needed to walk for one hour and a half to cool down.”

Later that year, Valencia joins Trevino Cuellar and the rest of the Black Heart team in Iqaluit.

“Because it’s the only coffee shop in town, the rhythm is kind of different,” he says.

Most of the café guests are government workers who find their way to caffeine before work or during lunch breaks.

2025: Both continue working at the Black Heart Café and aim to stay on for years to come.

Valencia’s — the family coffeeshop in the Philippines — still operates, managed by Valencia’s wife. He hopes she will also move to Nunavut and leave the coffeeshop to be operated by his mother.

“I really love it here,” he says.

“And I want my family to be with me.”

Tip from the trade: If you want to learn to make good coffee, you need to train your palate. You might not be able to tell the difference between beans with the notes of peach, mango or guava right away, but with practise you will learn.

Arctic Talent pick: DJ, singer and musician Mariana Barney.