With over 250 registered cafes in the ACT, tens of thousands of cups of coffee are poured in Canberra each day, but not every order is delivered with the same care and quality.

With more machines streamlining the coffee-making process and the costs of running a shop and hiring staff only getting higher, some cafe owners believe it’s becoming increasingly difficult to train quality baristas.

Manager at Coffee Collective, Caleb Evans, said that Canberra has one of the best cafe scenes in the country but believes the hospitality industry is at a crossroads.

Mr Evans said on its current path, the skills of Canberra baristas could begin to decline as businesses look at ways to cut costs.

He said the difference between someone who attends a two-hour course on how to make coffee and someone who has spent months learning how machines operate and the best way to extract quality from beans is significant.

“We’re not able to invest the money that we used to to sort of bring people up to the standard we want,” he said.

“A barista course has really got very little to do with the day-in, day-out of actually being a hospitality worker.

“Knowing the basic skills like how to pack a shot and the fundamentals of how to make coffee is not that hard.

“Understanding what’s going wrong with a coffee machine, why the extraction is different and having a proper palate for coffee, that’s much more than a four-hour shift.

“That requires months of training.”

Mr Evans said he’s cautious of the transition to automated machines, not because it will mean worse-tasting coffee but because he believes cafe owners will lose their passion for the industry.

“As we take more and more people out of the shops by automating stuff, you’re going to have fewer people wanting to run the businesses,” he said.

“If you really want someone that’s extremely solid at making coffee, you need to invest that time into them, and they need to want to learn that stuff as well.

“With the cost of things and the automation, it becomes harder for businesses to do that.”

Despite the concerns, Mr Evan said the quality of coffee in Canberra is still very high.

“We are one of the best, if not the best city to drink coffee in Australia. We’re so lucky to have two of the best roasters in Australia with Sasa and Ona,” he said.

“I do think we’ve lost a little bit of the focus on creativity and interest around the coffee scene. That purely comes down to staffing and the resources we have at hand.

“What we were doing five to 10 years ago in terms of our creativity with menus and stuff like that was so much more creative because we had more chefs and we had a greater ability to spend money on trialling out dishes or coffees.

“Now, we are seeing a shift from venues that are both bars and cafes to more specific shops that just sell food or just sell coffee.

“It’s unfortunate, but that’s what businesses have to do to survive now.”