Not one bit. Most of our students arrive having never touched a professional espresso machine. The first thing we do is put you behind one.

We start with your hands, not a slideshow. You'll dose, distribute, tamp, and pull within the first thirty minutes. The machine will tell you everything you need to know — the sound of the grind, the colour of the extraction, the weight on the scale.

What we ask is that you show up curious. Everything else we can teach.

Every session is on the bar. We have a 4:1 student-to-machine ratio — you are never waiting more than ten minutes for your turn, and in most sessions you're pulling continuously for stretches of forty minutes.

We work on La Marzocca Linea Classic machines because they're what you'll find in serious cafés. Acaia scales on every group. Mahlkönig grinders dialled to your dose. The setup is identical to a professional bar.

Lectures happen, but they're short and they happen after you've already felt the problem in your hands. We explain channeling once you've caused it. We explain extraction yield once you've tasted both ends of the curve.

Completely. About a third of our students never intend to work in a café. They want vocabulary. They want to taste a cup and know whether the grind was too coarse or the temperature was off. They want to stop guessing.

The Foundation Course was built with exactly this person in mind. One Saturday, thirty shots, and a framework you'll use every morning for the rest of your life. We cover dose, yield, time, and taste — the four things that explain every cup of espresso ever made.

You'll leave with calibrated hands and a reference sheet. More usefully, you'll leave knowing what questions to ask next.