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signature beverage can be more or less anything. If you can't taste the coffee, the drink won't score well, and if you add any element to the portafilter to change the espresso extraction, the drink will be disqualified. There is also no alcohol allowed. Besides these restrictions, ingredients can be added liberally, and mixed with whatever contraption comes to hand. On the world stage, the signature beverage is used as a differentiating factor between the very best baristas. It is scored out of 38 points, which is 22 percent of the sensory score, and one more point than is used for the cappuccino course. Given that the gap between first and third place in this year's World Barista Championship was only 35 points, the significance of the signature beverage in competition is all the more telling. And yet, I have never tasted a competition barista's signature drink in their store during normal shop hours. Through the prism of coffeeshop menus, signature drinks fall pitifully to the wayside to the more consequential pillars of espresso and cappuccino preparation. Even at the competitions it seems that the traditional signature drink has gone a little out of fashion. In the 2011 U.K. Barista Championship finals round, Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood served a deconstructed cappuccino as his signature drink: no added ingredients—just coffee and steamed milk. The year before, Irish Barista Champion Colin Harmon had served espresso mixed with two types of water (the comparison of hard and soft) at the WBC. It was more science experiment than culinary invention, it would seem. Today's signature drinks are hardly the intricate coffee cocktails one might expect of exceptional baristas. I went in search of a signature beverage. Twisting through the back streets behind Leadenhall Market in London's financial district I approached the inimitable Curators Coffee Studio. If the title didn't give it away, then the design-lead interior—heavy on raw wood and metal, and accented with matching teal Mazzer grinders and a La Marzocco Strada—made it pretty clear. This is a place where, through vast street-facing windows, the preparation of coffee is showcased as an art form. I met Curators owner Catherine Seay, and Krysty Prasolik, the company's creative coffee director, and they prepared me an extravagant coffee drink. Served in a tall glass, the drink was the rich mahogany brown of a well-made Manhattan. A strawberry straddled the lip of the glass while, below, flecks of green mint floated amongst the ice cubes. At its bottom, a faint pink mulch of muddled strawberries shone through. Called Summer Punch, this was one of Curators Coffee Studio's Curators Creations. Sipped through a black straw, a sharp strawberry sweetness hits the palate first, followed by a surprisingly deep, chocolatey roundness from the coffee. Floral notes lingered in the finish, buoyed by the fizz of sparkling water and delicate, refreshing mint. The coffee that inspired the drink was Square Mile's Gichathaini Espresso, a single-origin Kenyan that is, in Krysty's words "stunning. It's so juicy and so fruity, it's like chewing gum." Krysty and Catherine use the strawberries to highlight the coffee's lush fruitiness. The mint, in turn, brings out the herbaceous notes at its finish. The drink takes into account the season, too: "I wanted something light with a little bit of pop for summer and that's why it has the sparkling water," Krysty says. The building process for each new Curators Creation is almost 68 barista magazine always the same. Krysty starts by sourcing a coffee worth showcasing, "because you never know what you're going to be able to get." She then builds a recipe around it to show off exceptional and unusual qualities. "It is all about the coffee being the focus, we use other ingredients to highlight the coffee." The premise of the signature beverage is evidently no secret, and yet I am acutely aware that there is practically no other place I could be having this conversation; no other shop I have visited has provided me with a similar service. When I ask Catherine and Krysty what keeps other shops from featuring signature beverages, the answers aren't about cutting-edge coffee service philosophies. Instead, the conversation circles back to the two old business stalwarts: time and money. "It is something that disrupts the flow of service to do," Krysty says. "So I think for a lot of places it just might be something that isn't viable. They might want to do it, but it's just not possible." These are realities Krysty and Catherine were keenly aware of as they entered this business venture. "We took a gamble of whether it was going to fly because of our clientele," she continues. And did it? "It really, really did, and it was interesting because to be honest I didn't think it was going to," Krysty says. So why introduce a risky concept like this into an already thriving coffee-shop menu? Catherine tells me that she sees the signature drink as part of the progression of specialty coffee. "I think at the moment there's still a lot of education going around about what specialty coffee is." When Curators Coffee opened up in 2012, the area was not at all specialty-coffee savvy. "Lots of people had never had a good coffee before in their lives," Catherine says. "We were still back at square one trying to showcase the raw taste of coffee, and now we've kind of done that, we're beginning to build on top of it." Here Krysty chimes in: "This is just another evolution in how we're starting to enjoy our coffee, so I do think that other places should adopt it," Catherine adds, "It's just bizarre that all of these specialtycoffee shops have the [baristas with the] skills to make really good coffee and then pair it with other really good quality ingredients to make something amazing, but they don't." Hop on a plane to Missouri and you'll find Pete Licata's signature beverage, Coffee Therapy, on the menus at Kansas City's Parisi Artisan Coffee cafés, where he works as quality-assurance manager. The drink was part of his 2013 World Barista Championship–winning routine. Talking about the reasoning behind the transfer from competition to café, he explains, "a signature drink is not only an accessible avenue for less-experienced coffee drinkers, it is also a way for the barista to increase menu variety as well as give new experiences on a regular basis. "My drink at WBC was a balanced and complementary take on the espresso I was using," Pete continues. "It took minimal ingredients and techniques to create a major shift in flavor that still represented the original shot." Coffee Therapy is by design not a labor-intensive drink to prepare: "Double shot of Arnulfo Leguizamo espresso on ice, palm sugar, and bitters. Stir, strain, and serve in a champagne coupe", he says. It's almost critical that a signature drink on a café menu be easy to assemble. It's not coincidental that so many coffee shops operate on a similar