t o n x . o r g

Hope everyone is having a lovely Solstmas. Here is a fun video I put together from Saturday night’s FourBarrel/SweetMarias canned chili and homebrew bash, proving once again that coffee people are good at having fun.

May all your Santa pinata be filled with super bounce balls.

Congrats to M’lissa and Chris at Ritual who are making it official and announcing their engagement.

love is awesome.

At 11:39am this morning I had the following strange SMS conversation with my favorite coffee-gear guru, Terry Z of espressoparts:

me: “have you ever put green coffee in the laser etcher?”

TerryZ: “no….. never. should we try it?”

me: “of course you should try it!!!”

TerryZ: “just a hole or do you want me to roast it?”

me: “”t o n x”"

12:32pm

TerryZ: “check my flickr…….”

TerryZ and his crew are awesome people.

My good buddy Kyle just contributed this nifty report to the folks at BBTV. A peek into Fazenda Ipanema in Brasil - a large, lavish and highly technified farm producing some outstanding coffee. Its a big contrast to the smaller scale coffee production that I’ve witnessed and a reminder that coffee farms come in some surprising shapes and sizes.

Look forward to seeing more stuff like this from Kyle down the road.

There is a lot to process and a lot to say about the experience at Slow Food Nation. For now I just want to say that it felt like it was a tremendous success and thank everyone deeply for their hard work and the love they poured into it.

The coffees were amazing, the sense of community was amazing, and the dialogues with attendees were awesome.

We had kids and little old ladies drinking challenging single origin espressos and absolutely loving it - the debates about single origin espresso are over.

More to say, much to absorb… but I’m taking a few days off. :)

In addition to the unprecedentedly massive Coffee Pavilion at Fort Mason this weekend (and sorry to say all Taste Hall tickets have now sold out!), there are some other coffee related activities going on during Slow Food Nation. Worth noting are the Blue Bottle cart at Slow on the Go in front of City Hall, a taste session with chocolates as part of the Taste Workshops, and one last-minute event that Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture and I have put together for Saturday with support from the folks at the Long Now Foundation:

Saturday, August 30th
3:30pm-4:30pm

Long Now Foundation Gallery at Fort Mason

Producer Perspectives: The Present and Future of Quality Coffee

Globetrotting coffee buyer Peter Giuliano leads a roundtable discussion with coffee producers, contemplating the dramatic changes in the coffee market from a producer’s perspective. What are the implications when a highly crafted food product is created in a developing country, but consumed in the developed world? What does craftsmanship, sustainability, and quality mean from the coffee producer’s perspective? Plan on an engaging, freewheeling, and global discussion of coffee, culture, and economics.

Coffee from some of the participating producers will be served. A short Q & A session will follow.

Space is limited to 40 people, please RSVP by Friday at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pZAMMDFBmsM-barEfN27SIQ

The Long Now Foundation gallery is in Building A at Fort Mason Center. Map available here
http://longnow.org/contact/

We’ll be recording the session and uploading video at some point following the event. If you’re in the Bay Area, please consider joining us.

Being in San Francisco for Slow Food Nation means I get to catch the inaugural week at Four Barrel, Jeremy Tooker’s stunningly beautiful coffeebar in the Mission. I made this timelapse of the scene yesterday.

Big congratulations to Jeremy and the crew.

The ambitious, massive and inaugural Slow Food Nation, being billed as the largest celebration of food in history, is taking place in San Francisco starting on August 29th. Coffee is getting a place at the table.

Over Labor Day weekend, SF’s Fort Mason will be the site of the 50,000sq ft Taste Pavilion, presenting a cornucopia of some of the best good, clean, and fair culinary delights from around the country assembled by expert curators. There will be pavilions representing Coffee, Beer, Bread, Charcuterie, Cheese, Chocolate, Fish, Honey & Preserves, Ice Cream, Native Foods, Olive Oil, Pickles & Chutney, Spirits, Tea and Wine.

I got tapped to be a co-curator for the Coffee Pavilion with friends Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffe and Eileen Hassi of Ritual Roasters. Delivering a world class coffee and espresso experience for thousands of attendees with almost no budget is a challenge most coffee professionals would have had the good sense to run away screaming from, but not us. Fast forward many months… we have pulled together an amazing team and are set to rock the house on an unprecedented scale.

Attendees will be served single origin coffees from outstanding farms and producers by an all-star cast of baristas and coffee professionals. We tapped ten forward looking roasters to help us assemble coffees which would best showcase the role of the producer in creating and revealing quality coffee. The focus is firmly on the farmer and not fancy brew methods, roasting mythology, or certification schemes - the familiar tropes under which coffee is often presented. Our goal is to demonstrate the variety of flavors that coffee can express and promote the relationship between quality and sustainability.

This event may mark the first time that coffee is being granted fair footing in a foodie context. Thankfully we have some great folks contributing great effort to make sure we don’t screw it up. The gang at La Marzocco and Franke is providing us a fleet of GB5 espresso machines. We’ve wrangled an array of Clovers and espresso grinders from several roasters’ stashes and Nuova Simonelli is lending us some Mythos grinders for our brew bar. TerryZ and the EspressoParts crew are coming through with tampers, pitchers, fixtures, and a billion demitasse as well as solving innumerable engineering challenges. Brent Fortune of Crema in PDX is saving our asses daily as our volunteer coordinator. Heath Ceramics has created a custom cup for our taste flights and Douglas Burnham and his team at Envelope A+D have designed a beautiful space for us in the hall. There will be many more to thank and give credit to before this is over.

I’ll have more details in an upcoming post about the coffees, our impressive roster of roasters, special guests, and other neat coffee happenings during the event. If you’re in the Bay Area, I encourage you to attend. The Taste Pavilions are open to the public in 2 sessions each day on Saturday the 30th and Sunday the 31st. Tickets are moving fast and are available online or at SF area Whole Foods stores. If you come, say hi - I’ll be the overcaffeinated, panicked looking guy covered in coffee grounds with wheels on his shoes cursing into an iphone.

Congratulations are in order for Stephen Morrissey who captured the crown in Copenhagen and became the new World Barista Champion, adding another trophy to the crowded mantle at the U.K.’s nascent Square Mile Coffee Roasters.

The time and resources dedicated to these competitions by the folks who finish on top is as much awe-inspiring as uhh-inspiring, a quixotic pursuit even by the windmill chasing standards of coffee freakdom. Ultimately, I hope it proves to be worth something more to Stephen than just the admiration of his colleagues - though I’ll throw my sincere admiration and affection for the guy onto that pile for good measure. I predict he’ll soon leverage his charms into having his own TV show, a line of custom sneakers, and be flying on Bono’s private jet to the next Cup of Excellence auction.

I finished posting photos from my amazing April trip to Guatemala where I met facilitators and producers from a project working on quality improvement for small coffee farmers in Huehuetenango, funded by Slow Food.

Starbucks buying Clover is becoming a publicity boon to “third wave” coffee. Nearly all of the many articles that have appeared about the move advance one or more of the fundamental conceits of the quality coffee movement.

I attended the Specialty Coffee Association of America annual conference in Minneapolis. As always it provided a fascinating snapshot in time of an industry in ever-increasing flux as well as a chance to connect and reconnect with the many beautiful people that make it move. Some photos here.

My friend and frequent coconspirator Kyle Glanville is the new US barista champion, edging out some well matched competitors in what might have been the tightest game this weird sport has seen yet. As a “prize” for his victory, his face will appear on thousands of bottles of vanilla flavored syrup. In June he’ll take his shtick to the WBC in Copenhagen. There is a slim chance I’ll be in attendance if flights magically become cheaper as the date approaches.

Michaele Weissman, who wrote one of the seminal articles on the new models of relationship coffees a couple years back, has a new book out God in a Cup The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee which chronicles the quixotic efforts of some familiar names in the trade and asks some intriguing questions. It deserves a proper review here once I’ve fully digested it, but for now let me tell you that she is a great storyteller and if you’re a reader of this blog its probably right up your alley. You should also check out her recently launched blog.

I’m part of a cabal of coffee folks attempting to deliver a best-of-class coffee tasting experience to attendees of this year’s inaugural Slow Food Nation event labor day weekend in San Francisco. The scale of the event will present some compelling challenges - I’ll be writing more about this as the date approaches.

Emily and I are looking to move back home to Seattle in the Fall (before the gas shortages kick in and Los Angeles goes all Mad Max on us). Before we go, there’ll be a blog post or two of my favorite things in L.A., a city I’ve come to dig despite my initial resistance.

I have a number of professional itches I’d like to scratch, and am working on a project that will encompass many of them. Stay tuned.