I think it was artist Jenny Holzer who said it best in her truism series: "Everything is delicately interconnected".
In coffee, that thought slaps me upside the head everyday...maybe not indelicately...but it is certainly not subtle.
I am late for bed. I need to wake up at 3 am to catch a plane to Roasters Guild Retreat which is going down this weekend at Sugar Lake Lodge in Grand Rapids, MN. There, I will meet roasters from all over the world. It's a condensed and slightly more specialized version of the annual SCAA conference. At this thing, coffee is the purpose. Sure, there are a bunch of roasting machines there to mess with, but still, the coffee is why we show up.
And the connection.
We are assigned to a team of roasters and asked to craft the best coffee possible. We give our team a goofy name and set to work..arguing and grandstanding, slurping and sampling again, grading and blending. After all of that, you can't help but feel a connection to eachother and the coffee.
A couple of years ago I met a woman in Nicaragua at a cupping table. She was heading out to Rimini, Italy the next day. At that conference she met two of my good friends - one from Seattle and one from Oslo.
Last week I met a group of amazing women at a seminar in Costa Rica. I get to see at least two of them again in Grand Rapids this weekend. A dude in Costa Rica gave me Peter G's cupping spoons that he left behind in New York at the Q exams... I'll give them to Peter when I see him at the retreat.
Not sure where I am going with this, but maybe I'm just thinking about how global and specific this coffee thing is...all at the same time. It's intimate and huge. And it's just so cool.
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ReplyDeleteInterconnected in our case by the blue highways. We have been to so many amazing operations across the country from the Gulf states to the midwest and consistently we feel that every roaster wants their espresso customer to succeed, every green buyer wants the grower to succeed. The whole reason we are on this trip is to communicate that sense of how this industry can be so huge while the craft is small and focused. Filthy, dirty, tired, and operating on auto pilot we pulled in to Cafe Imports where we were greeted by people who were genuinely happy to see us even though we might be the smallest of their small accounts. I love this business. Merry Roasters rolling on...
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