t o n x . o r g

Jay Caragay of Jay’s Shave Ice prepares to win the crowd at the otherwise vanilla USBC.

Amid all the noise of the parasitical peddlers on the showfloor (business people who remain sadly ignorant of the true nature of good coffee) there were some beacons of cool shit at this years show. Its hard to come up with a list of highlights, but a few moments stand out and bear mention.

Tasting Terroir’s Kenya Tegu and Stumptown’s Brazil CoE Top Sky from the Clover was like a revelation. When coffees of this caliber start being served on newly deployed Clovers, a real sea change in consumer appreciation of origin coffees will not be far behind. Roasting as a craft will gain in appreciation as the full subtleties of coffee are exposed in a way that only meticulous cupping revealed before. Those guys took home a ‘best of show’ trophy - no surprise given the constant throngs at their booth.

Jay caragay (cohost of the long-winded but oddly entertaining portafilter.net podcasts) provided the most lively round of the barista competition and had one of the more intriguing and well executed of the specialty drinks - a cigar-infused frozen vanilla cream foam with Hines’ espresso that I had the great pleasure of tasting. A verbose espresso enthusiast blogger named Ben (whom I may have provided dangerous encouragement to in his propulsion towards coffee punditry) posted a video of Jays performance on his site.

Meeting so many like-minded yet eccentric people and folks sharing a common passion is a heady experience and well worth the price of admission (though Kyle and I actually snuck in with borrowed badges). It really feels like there is a momentum towards some higher ideals that are, as of yet, still too underrepresented in most shops. My initial notion of doing some fear-and-loathing style blogging of the underside of all this madness fell by the wayside as I sipped the tastier kool-aids of friends old and new.

UPDATE: Jay has a great post about developing his sig drink and the experience of the USBC.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 12:39 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.