The barista school that wrote the book
Barista Basics Coffee Academy started in a small Artarmon training room in 2000. Twenty-five years later we still run the world's first coffee art course, every trainer is a working barista or café owner, and the book our founders wrote is still in print — yours to buy today.
Twenty-five years of teaching coffee
We opened in Artarmon in 2000, when barista training in Australia barely existed as a thing you could book. Cafés taught their own staff, badly, on the job — and the people who wanted to learn properly had nowhere to go.
What began as one room with a handful of machines became the course that has trained 100,000+ baristas across the country. Along the way our founders, David and Matthew Gee, ran a coffee roasting facility and four espresso bars, and built the first coffee art course in the world — at a time when latte art was something you admired in a cup, not something anyone thought to teach.
They also wrote the book on it. Bean There, Drunk That… is the guide that came out of these classes, and it is still in print — you can buy a copy today.
Barista Basics Coffee Academy is now CBD College's barista training school (RTO 91399). Same rooms, same machines, the same course the founders built — taught today by working baristas and café owners, not classroom-only teachers.
Before the classroom
Coffee wasn't the Gee brothers' first career — here's how two decades of buying, roasting and running cafés led to the course you can book today.
David Gee
A Bachelor of Commerce from the University of New South Wales and an MBA from the Simon Business School, University of Rochester, New York. David started out as an accountant and stockbroker, then moved into licensing and promotions for The Walt Disney Company in Hong Kong and Melbourne (1992–1996), before running his own licensing company, Wave Licensing International, across eight Asian countries with his brothers — living in Singapore from 1996 to 2000.
Matthew Gee
A Bachelor of Economics (Honours) and a Bachelor of Laws (Honours), both from the University of Sydney, where he also tutored and lectured in the Accounting Faculty (1994–95). Like David, Matthew lived in Singapore from 1996 to 2000, co-running the brothers' licensing business.
In 2000, the brothers became partners in a coffee wholesaler and specialty roaster in Sydney's Artarmon. Wanting to see the retail side too, they bought four up-market Brisbane cafés, GOSH Coffee — where they learned the barista craft under real pressure, without compromising on presentation or service. They went on to start their own wholesale coffee company, supplying cafés and restaurants from Hobart to Cairns, and teaching their own customers — and eventually the public — the art of espresso. Barista Basics Coffee Academy's purpose-built training café opened in 2003 and was rebuilt in 2005; the course itself was the result of two years of research with university-trained teachers, professional baristas and industry leaders, and in the early 2000s was the only barista course in Australia carrying TAFE affiliation.
By the mid-2000s the brothers were writing for industry titles including Bean Scene and Tea and Coffee Asia, had appeared on Nine's Mornings with Kerri-Anne and Fresh with Jeff Jansz, and were Choice Magazine's official espresso taste-testers for its 2004 and 2005 home-machine reviews.
Why people choose us over a cheaper class
There are plenty of three-hour barista classes around. Here is what a quarter of a century of doing this actually buys you.
We wrote the book. Literally.
Bean There, Drunk That… the Definitive Guide to Coffee and the World of the Barista is our founders' book. Our courses are where it came from.
The first coffee art course in the world
Latte art was something you saw in a café, not something anyone taught, until we built a course around it. Everyone teaches it now.
Trainers who've actually run cafés
Every trainer is a working barista or café owner — not a classroom-only teacher. You are taught by people who do this for a living.
We have run the businesses we teach about
A coffee roasting facility and four espresso bars between them — so the advice is about working cafés, not theory.
Your own machine, every time
Your own steam wand and group handle each, on commercial machines. Nobody stands and watches.
100,000+ baristas trained
Since 2000, across Australia — from people chasing a first hospitality job to café owners retraining their staff.
Bean There, Drunk That…
The Definitive Guide to Coffee and the World of the Barista — written by our founders, out of the course you can book today. Everything from the green bean to the pour.
Come and learn on a real machine
Classes run in Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bringing a group or a school? We do those too.