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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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.