Canvas in a cup

Pouring a cup of coffee isn’t just an early morning habit for Cabell Tice. It’s math; it’s physics, and — above all — it’s art.

Tice has worked at Revelator Coffee on Third Avenue North since June. He is also a three-time World Latte Art Championship winner. He has competed around the world with a cup of steamed milk as his medium instead of oil paint or charcoal.

Tice got started in the world of coffee about eight years ago, taking a summer job at a coffee shop in Oregon whose owner taught him to “do coffee correctly.”

“I sort of stumbled into coffee and accidentally stayed in it for a while,” he said.

From that job and the ones that would follow, Tice learned all the elements that make a cup of coffee stand out: original source, bean quality, texture, grind, roasting and brewing time, recipes and the individual differences between every batch of beans. 

But it was his next job at a shop in Boston that gave Tice the chance to develop latte-pouring skill. He made coffees for hours every day without pause, and Tice compared the repetition to the old adage that 10,000 hours of practice can make a person an expert at any skill.

“I don’t have those 10,000 hours, but it was definitely 10,000 lattes,” Tice said.

As he started to understand the mechanics behind creating flowers and other designs on the surface of a latte, Tice became interested in competing. Latte art competitions are based on speed, difficulty, symmetry, color and other artistic elements, not about flavor — “not to say that I don’t make an amazing latte,” Tice interjected.

It took Tice a while to get over his nerves and start competing well.

“For me, the training leading up to the first one … was six months of losing latte art competitions and understanding how to handle my nerves, and then six months of winning every single one in New England,” Tice said.

When he made it to his first world championship in New York in 2013, Tice was one of the bottom seeds out of 64 competitors, and he said he would have been happy just to make it through the first round. 

“That was my strategy, was just to not suck,” Tice said.

Tice won his round against a man who had previously taken fourth place at a world competition. He continued to out-pour other competitors, and no one was more surprised than Tice when he walked away with a championship trophy.

“I was floored,” Tice said.

Since then, he has won another world championship in Seattle in 2013 and again in 2014. He said he only knows two other latte artists who have won three times.

“Getting one is a challenge, but three is an anomaly,” Tice said.

His next major competition will be in Nashville early next year, though he’ll pour in some smaller competitions between now and then. Though he has developed strategies for practicing and preparing for each individual opponent, Tice said he still gets nervous every time.

Going to a latte art competition is as much about the people as about the bragging rights. Many latte artists have been competing against one another for years, and, if they live on opposite sides of the country or around the world, the championships may be the only time they see each other.

“It’s like a family reunion every time there’s one of these competitions,” Tice said.

Tice chose to start working at Revelator in part because of his wife’s Birmingham roots, and partly because he said he was excited by the company’s ambitions and being “part of the movers and the shakers” in the coffee world. You won’t often see him behind the bar, though — Tice’s role is focused more on choosing coffees to brew and training the baristas to make a good cup from start to finish, including the flourish of art on each latte.

Since arriving in Birmingham, Tice has connected with other shops and coffee aficionados to create the Birmingham Coffee Collective, which held a “barista throwdown” in August as a launch party. Tice said Revelator hosted a few hundred people for the event, including representatives from 10 different coffee shops. He said the Collective is planning more events, including tastings and another competition, to build friendships between Birmingham’s coffee makers.

“There’s a lot of community,” Tice said.