Like a proverbial preteen caught snooping through the parental dresser drawers, I felt a vague kind of almost nervous out-of-placeness throughout my experience at Symposium 2012. Don’t get me wrong, I had a wonderful time, I learned, I tweeted, and I basked in the glow of an assembly of coffee pioneers, geniuses, and powerbrokers. Perhaps that latter point is why I felt a bit on the outside looking in: Or, at the very least, a little lonely.

Because of either subject matter or expense (or both), the standard programming at Symposium appeals to and attracts a pretty specific crowd. Namely, the Big Decision Makers in Specialty Coffee. Role call: Coffee roasters, cafe owners, brand managers, green-bean importers, producers, and a myriad of folks whose titles comprise strings of capital letters (CEOs, LLCs, BFDs).

This is, of course, a good thing. It’s important and advantageous to use the natural gathering point of SCAA as a way to bring together power brokers and discuss industry-wide strategy. Our industry makes the most of this time once a year to put some valuable heads together in the same room, where they can troubleshoot our collective issues. This year’s program reminded me of a TED conference, right down to the Coffee Common-esque multiroaster, multibarista coffee service during breaks. And not just for the coffee, but for the undeniable fact that Symposium 2012 took place behind a kind of velvet rope. (Velvet jute bag?)

Just like at TED, Big Issues were certainly discussed, and with great, impassioned, and inspiring fervor: How do we make specialty coffee more sustainable? How do we launch a counterstrike against increasingly-ubiquitous K-cups, and the pervasive allure of their perceived convenience? What is to be done about vanishing coffee lands, about diminished yields, about food crisis at origin?

But when the speakers exhausted themselves and the crowd was dismissed for recess, whom did we all ask for information about the actual coffees being served? The baristas in the lobby, outside the lecture hall.

A lot of arm-waving goes into these conversations, and it’s pivotal that we as an industry get riled up enough about them to do something to effectively push back. But who among those in the auditorium, behind the closed doors, is going to spread that message among coffee consumers? The importers? The roasters?

The barista is the parish priest to the industry archbishops gathered at Symposium. It is the barista who’s in the pulpit of the cafe every day, preaching the good and dirty word of specialty coffee to any and everybody who will listen. And it is unfortunately, in my mind, the barista who is unintentionally kept at bay at events like this, relegated instead to spectating at the coffee-making competitions and on the trade-show floor. Not that baristas don’t love showmanship and free samples, but I feel as though there’s tremendous value to be added to future Symposiums by including those voices – and those perspectives – in the main room.

There is an argument to be made for active barista inclusiveness at Symposium, so what would it take to make it happen? Would some kind of scholarship program, like this year’s geared toward incentivizing producers work to encourage accessibility to baristas? What about a discount rate for larger companies sending 3 or more baristas to the event? A discount for part-time volunteer service? A Hunger Games-esque national lottery, where prized free tickets to Symposium 2013 are given away to eligible SCAA member shops? Or would a panel discussion that includes a greater diversity of voices do the trick?

(Also, while I’m got the conch: Perhaps we could recruit more women from within the industry to participate next year? Most of the female voices on that stage – with the notable and incredibly valuable exception of SCAA deputy executive director Tracy Ging – were culled from the worlds of cheese, third-party strategy consulting, food advocacy, and journalism. Surely if women like Asnakech Thomas, Ethiopia’s sole female coffee miller & exporter, are impressive enough to talk about, talking with them would have even greater impact?)

That said, this is meant to be a gentle criticism of Symposium, and one that is born from recognition of its values. I bring up my desire for increased barista inclusion because I think it’s a shame to see the thought-provoking and valuable dialogues of Symposium restricted by a kind of intellectual fire wall, when they could be igniting across every branch of our industry. A great sermon is hard to embody and empower when it’s delivered in a vacuum.

Archbishops, gather your parish priests. Give them your great message, and send them out into the world armed with the knowledge, passion, and caffeine it takes to start making a difference to consumers. Consider the many memes of Symposium 2012: the difficulties faced by those who grow wonder at origin; a renewed and revitalized focus on service; and the need for enduring partnerships to exist between coffee producers and buyers. For these issues and more, you’ll find those kids in the hall serving coffee to be among the most powerful, faithful advocates. Can I get an Amen?

Sprudge.com contributor Erin Meister also writes for The Nervous Cook and Serious Eats, and is a customer relations representative for Counter Culture Coffee. This concludes her week-long #symp2012 coverage.

More from Meister on Symp2012:

Day 1, Part One
Day 1, Part Two
Day 2, Part One
Day 2, Part Two

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The tables were turned – and turned hard! – on a crowd of coffee people in a lunch coma the afternoon of Day 2, with a twofer of flipped philosophy on media and consumer perspectives of coffee, and a game-changing argument about improving and redefining the retail experience.

The first, a panel moderated by Wrecking Ball Roaster’s Nick Cho, comprised three prominent voices in the outside-coffee world: Seattle Times columnist Melissa Allison, Cool Hunting blogger Julie Woolfson, and the omni-contributive Oliver Strand. As writers at the mercy of cranky editors, rapid-fire deadlines, and superfickle consumer trends, what do these three media taste-makers think are the important stories to tell in coffee, from the angle of reader interest?

“The ‘artisinal food’ movement has taken hold of everybody,” Woolfson offered, speaking to Cool Hunting’s drive toward finding the hippest new spot, the most eye-catching new package, and the visual story behind the coffee and its place in a person’s individual design and lifestyle landscape. “More and more I hear people shifting their conversations from food and cocktails to ‘Where are you drinking coffee?’ and ‘Where is the best coffee?’”

Meanwhile, Allison spoke to the difficulties she faces as a business writer in a city that derives a significant amount of its economic health and growth from the coffee industry: “I’m used to writing for a business reader. When I write about Starbucks, I feel like the traditional business readers are getting what they want. But the independent coffeehouse customers and baristas… That’s a different story.”

“The coffee’s fun, but the coffee industry seems to be unhappy being told that coffee’s fun,” Strand said, laying a gentle smackdown on the sometimes blinding self-importance that specialty coffee industry insiders can exude when insisting that our “stories” be told in infinite, intimate detail.

“The [specialty coffee] industry has taken what is a very complicated product and made it more complicated. Most other industries take complicated products and make them simpler in terms of perception, in terms of understanding.”

Despite himself, Strand even drew comparisons between coffee and wine: “Wine is incredibly complicated, but it tastes great, and the story and narrative is very easy.” He would go on to say: “I think the wine analogy is a horrible idea and a terrible mistake [in coffee],” because of the imprecise use of a largely misappropriated vocabulary that it encourages. “The best wine is better than the best coffee, and you’re never going to match it. It’s never going to happen. So use your own words. Cheese isn’t trying to be like ‘cow wine,’ it has its own language.”

Meanwhile, chucking wine out the window, Square Mile Coffee Roasters co-owner and former World Barista Champion James Hoffmann compared espressos and hamburgers. We’ve all had the $1 hamburger, and the vast majority of us have also had a mind-blowing $15 hamburger: We understand the inherent differences between the two experiences because of the ingredients used, the environment each one is native to, and the way that it’s presented and priced.

But what about espresso? “What would you pay for a good espresso?” Hoffmann asked. “About 1.6UKD? That number doesn’t really matter. Compare that number to what you would pay for an average espresso, or a bad espresso.” Its all the same 1.6UKD, it’s all the same “queueing up to the register,” exchanging cash for a paper cup, and expecting to see the same faces day in and day out, one espresso shot after another.

“If you had a friend who had Burger King for lunch every single day, wouldn’t you stage an intervention? [In specialty cafes], we just want you to come back every day. But the better a restaurant gets,” Hoffmann argued, “the less often they see the same people. Yet they manage to be successful and sustainable.”

Diversity, he emphasized, is the only solution. “We desperately need to foster diversity in our industry, even if it feels contradictory to what we do. If we create a diverse marketplace, everybody benefits.”

Disrupt everything. Make it fun. Turn coffee into a love affair, and celebrate both the simple and complicated joys that come with it. Get out there and make it happen. But first, where are we getting $15 hamburgers in Portland?

The post Meister’s Musings: Symposium Day Two, Afternoon appeared first on Sprudge.com.

The activists were quickly and calmly dispersed, and the doors were opened to attendees, who ruminated with each other about the incident.

“If we didn’t include speakers from origins where there was political unrest, that’d eliminate about 70% of coffee origins from being here,” I overheard one industry insider say. “We’re trying to do our jobs, and to buy better coffee, and to improve things in places like Honduras. We’re not the enemy. They’re yelling at the wrong people.”

(Note: There were no stuffed biscuits after all, but there was heightened security once the activists were dispersed.)

Coffee’s tumultuous political history has always been an undercurrent of the serious discussions bandied about at events like this, though some would rather downplay the inherent social and socioeconomic complexities in favor of loosey-goosey feel-good Specialty Coffee Can Save The World™ optimism, but getting bogged down in either soundbite cycle is dangerous and naive.

(This might be the lack of biscuits talking. Sorry; I took that pretty hard.)

Once the atmosphere cooled down a little, President Lobo spoke about the importance coffee has on the social and economic health of his country and countrymen: More than 300,000 of the national population of 7.5 million produce coffee, he said, which has helped established Honduras as the world’s second largest producer of washed Arabicas.

“We realize the social benefit that [coffee growers] are receiving is really extraordinary,” President Lobo said through a translator. “I am really grateful for you in the name of Honduras. Not just as the president, but in the name of the people.”

People were precisely the focus of Day 2′s presentations: How to relate to them, how to attract them, what they want from their morning cup and their roaster relationships, and how we can learn from them and interact with them better – from the producer to the coffee drinker to the tastemakers in the media.

Of the producer, Intelligentsia Coffee CEO Doug Zell offered what he feared might be an “impolite” perspective: “I think the issue with the producer at this point,” he said, “is that they perceive themselves as sustenance dirt farmers. We have to change the way they perceive themselves.” Intelli’s retail manager Stephen Morrissey chimed in to ask, “Why is it so fanciful to think that a person who plants a coffee tree would be able to think of that coffee as a Chemex brew?”

Finishing each others’ sentences, Zell and Morrissey drove home an idea so true and logical as to almost be novel: “Employ specialty practices and specialty systems if you are creating and expecting specialty coffee. We challenge you to go out there and…disrupt everything.”

But what happens when our perspectives get disrupted? When we actually look at the people who are at the other end of these “specialty” cups, what do they expect from our work? SCAA deputy executive director Tracy Ging served up a slice of honest humble pie with a presentation about the motivations, behaviors, and perceptions of the specialty-coffee customer base, reminding us that for the average consumer, coffee is all about heart. Sparkly hearts, to be exact – just like the ones found on myriad collages depicting “What Specialty Coffee Means to Me” created by focus-group participants in the coffee-driven markets of Los Angeles and Portland, OR.

“The people who drink [specialty coffee] have the capacity to love it deeply,” Ging said in response to the groups’ collected results. “Something happens over a great cup of coffee that’s different than when you’re just grabbing a cup of caffeine.”

Ging reminded the attendees that while our customers do have a healthy curiosity about what they’re drinking and how we make that magic happen, they don’t want to be beaten over the head with it: In fact, many of them sound like they kind of need a big ol’ barista bear hug.

“They want a love affair, and we’re giving them altitude and rainfall statistics,” she said. Not every detail, and not at every moment. And hey, flash a smile every once in a while, okay?

The morning’s final collection of panelists brought an even more varied set of perspectives to the table, speaking to the things that our coffee community can learn from focused – and arguably more successful – market approaches in the specialty booze, cheese, and beer world.

While Imbibe Magazine publisher Kate Foley implored us to learn the lessons of specialty booze by telling our story better (Be original! Inspire curiosity! Be iconic!), New Seasons Market food services division direct (and curd-lover) Jamie Powell spoke to the paths being blazed by cutting-edge cheese mongers, including… cheese-carving contests?

“‘Really, Jamie? You want me to think seriously about cheese art?’ No, I don’t want you to think seriously about it… But it gets customers who don’t know anything about cheese…interested, and then we know what to do with them.”

(For Pete’s sake: No biscuits at breakfast, and now you’re talking about cheese – glorious cheese! – right around lunchtime?? #NotFair.)

Finally, Coffee Shrub’s Christopher Schooley swung for the fences with a great video presentation about the home-coffee experience, raising important contrasts from what booze and cheese present to their customer bases but that are more difficult for us with kitchen-coffee consumers.

“That cheesemonger or that brewer gets to present a fully actualized product to the consumer,” Schooley argued. “That’s not exactly the case with coffee. We’re sending people home with something that we’ve put a lot of effort and care behind, and what can happen there can go haywire.” How to prevent that berserk French press disaster or demystify the brewing process for a still-half-asleep coffee lover is a great hurdle, but not an impossibly high one.

“Being able to brew a great cup of coffee at home needs to be achievable,” he said.

Now let’s achieve it, people!

Erin Meister is our newest contributor. She writes for The Nervous Cook and Serious Eats, and is a customer relations representative for Counter Culture Coffee. Enjoy her #symp2012 coverage all week long.

The post Meister Report: Symposium Day 2, Part 1 appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Let’s review: Collaboration, volatility, and innovation are on everybody’s minds here in Portland, OR, and SCAA Symposium 2012 seeks to address those concerns with real and sustainable solutions that can be implemented across the supply chain.

…except we haven’t really come up with them yet.

“We don’t need magical silver bullets,” said Counter Culture co-owner and former SCAA president Peter Giuliano, whom most people in the room wouldn’t figure for much of a shootin’ man. (Double guns, though? Maybe.) “Magical solutions are only needed to kill big, scary problems. What we have are ordinary problems, and what we need are ordinary solutions.”

Ordinary solutions, thankfully, can come from ordinary people doing ordinary things: Like trying to make coffee farms more efficient, which is what presenter Chris Jordan of Dormans advocated by pointing to the fact that “Costa Rica produces twice the coffee on half the amount of land as Kenya,” to the tune of over 163 million trees on 68,000 hectares, as opposed to the African origin’s nearly 152 million trees on 135,500 hectares. Taking climate, processing, soil health, and variety into consideration (among the myriad other things that go into a successful harvest), is there a feasible way to make Kenya as productive and efficient as a place like Costa Rica? Is that a magic bullet or a regular one?

To NUCOFFEE marketing manager Daniel Friedlander, the not-so-magic bullet we need is more commitment to the balance between transparency (what producers want) and traceability (what roasters and consumers want) between the growing sector and the wholesale/retail sector. Players in the industry need to “think outside of the box and see that when we balance traceability and transparency, there are limitless possibilities for value creation… The most important step(ed: is that a glint of silver?)is to create the initiative to [create that balance]” through a model based on collaboration and integration instead of competition. “Collaboration and transparency will strengthen the coffee chain,” he insisted. (What was that that just whizzed by? Are we shooting at werewolves? This is like an awesome, caffeinated action movie all of a sudden!)

Ordinary people creating extraordinary (and financially sound) relationships are the weapon of choice for Craig Holt of Atlas Coffee Importers: “Good intentions aren’t going to cut it,” he said. “You need to pay more than the other buyers are going to pay for that coffee… It has to be in the growers’ best financial interest to sell to you.”

But the healthiest relationships have a true and deep personal element beyond but including the “big foam check”: There’s a need for “substantial investment of time and energy.”

“I’ve always treated business relationships as extensions of our communities,” Holt continued. “By doing business, we’re becoming part of each other’s future. [And] I’m not talking about ‘Kumbaya’ and drum circles…” (Not that we don’t all love a good drum circle. At Camp Pull-A-Shot, perhaps?)

Continuing what felt like a Scout’s pledge to “Kumbaya” our way into significant systemic improvements, Liam Brody of Root Capital suggested that in order to build resiliency in the value chain, specialty coffee players “need to come together like peanut butter and jelly” and become “pathologically collaborative” (hashtag that!) to combat serious threats to producer-buyer relationships, such as fuel and oil prices, erratic weather, currency fluctuation, market speculation, food prices… And he sees investment at origin as the means to that end, and the way to bring about real and lasting change by allowing growers to make financial and technological inroads toward higher quality and more predictable, sustainable yields.

Do less bad; do more good – that’s the final word on the day’s presentations, a directive by Imaginals innovations strategist Maggie De Pree. “Enroll changemakers both big and small,” she said, “and include your customers in the decision to drive change related to those issues.”

Sounds great, and we’ll get right on it, right after we finish this basket-weaving project. We’re trying to get our Silver Bullet badge before we leave Portland…

Erin Meister is our newest contributor. She writes for The Nervous Cook and Serious Eats, and is a customer relations representative for Counter Culture Coffee. Enjoy her#symp2012 coverage all week long.

The post Symposium 2012: Meister’s Final Word On Day One appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Many chatted about last year’s program, the concerns it raised (climate change, supply/demand shift, market volatility); some mused about the fact that we’d all be collected en masse in a single room for the duration, rather than split among ranks and interests as in past years; others still complained that it’s always freezing at these types of events. (Isn’t Portland supposed to be some kind of ecofriendly mecca? Can we turn down the AC for Pete’s sake?!?)

But when the program kicked in with the first discussions about market volatility and strengthening the supply chain, it was clear we were all full of one thing in particular: Questions, many (perhaps too many) of them rhetorical. But also hope and enthusiasm for the future of speciality coffee in this particular moment, in 2012.

What do we do to combat or counteract volatility for coffee growers and coffee buyers? (Nothing: We can only learn to try to protect ourselves against its inevitability.) Where will the 30 million bags of coffee that we need to balance the global supply/demand shift come from? (If we’re not careful, from increased production of Robusta and low-cup-quality Arabicas.) Are crop yield and coffee quality mutually exclusive? (Well…) What role does or should governments have in encouraging policies and frameworks to support growers in producing countries? (It depends who you ask.)

The takeaways from the morning’s discussions managed to agree on a few significant points: Collaboration is key; volatility is unavoidable but not necessarily a death sentence to our segment of the industry; and innovation is as close to a “silver bullet” as we’re going to get, if we can keep our minds and our conversations open to it.

Collaboration has a special place at the heart of Symposium, and, arguably, at the heart of specialty coffee in general. More than one speaker took to the podium with grand ideas about de-emphasizing the role of competition within our corner of the global coffee market, advocating instead for a kind of free-flowing exchange of technological, economic, and social development and discovery. (If that sounds all woo-woo John-and-Yoko bed-in, I’ll take this opportunity to gently remind you of the oft-quoted adage about rising tides…)

And of course the spirit of collaboration and community extends past the podium: Business cards fly hot and heavy at industry gatherings, of course, but so does laughter, raised voices, and some pretty fierce tweeting (#symp2012).

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As an industry strategy and approach at creating solutions, collaboration goes hand-in-hand with innovation: One person developing brilliant new technologies in a vacuum amounts to nothing more than a proverbial tree falling in the proverbial woods. But if we are able to create and maintain outlets for sharing Symposium, for example, and the World Coffee Research’s work; we can at least prepare to bridge gaps between coffee growers and buyers, between roasters and consumers, between consumers and their preconceived notions (be they what they may).

That leaves volatility, the elephant in the room. (You ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen a volatile elephant in a room full of coffee people.) Climate change and other nature-related instability have rocked certain growing regions again and again in the past few years; fluctuating coffee prices and speculation has created credit anxiety among farmers with much to lose and little luxury for risk taking; and the fact that demand is quickly outpacing supply in several coffee markets exacerbates and compounds the whole mess.

“Coffee is not about tranquility,” said Pacific Coast Coffee Association’s Albert Scalla. (Have truer words ever been spoken?)

Third-generation coffee farmer and Anacafé board member Juan Luis Barrios echoed Scalla’s sentiment by advocating for well-developed direct relationships with growers. “Small farmers want to lower their volatility,” Scalla said. “They want to know they’ll have a sustainable price over time.” (Volatility, meet collaboration.)

And Carlos Brando of P&A International Marketing (which does work with the International Coffee Organization), said that there is innovation to be shared—it’s just a matter of facilitating the conversation. “What are top-yielding farmers doing differently?” he asked. “They prove that the technology exists [to improve yields].” (Collaboration, meet innovation.)

But beyond all the (admittedly very important) talk of technology and marketing, there’s still the fundamental coffee-ness of coffee that keeps us coming back and wanting to do more, and to do better.

“I love heirloom tomatoes not just because they’re beautiful and intriguing, but because they taste just like tomatoes,” said SCAA executive director Ric Rhinehart. “And more importantly, there’s a range of taste across the spectrum. As differentiated as they are in shape and color and size, they’re that differentiated in taste. The real value for me is not how many tons of tomatoes per acre we can yield…or the uniformity of the tomatoes. What I really care about is the experience. We’re not talking about coffee that’s the equivalent of a commercial tomato. We’re here because we want the coffee to deliver us to an experience: The experience of coffee.

“Make the coffee more beautiful,” Rhinehart continued. “Make the coffee taste better, and most of all, engage people in the experience of having a cup of coffee.”

And a room full of coffee professionals sighed romantically. (And suddenly had an overwhelming craving for a Caprese salad…)

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Erin Meister is our newest contributor. She writes for The Nervous Cook and Serious Eats, and is a customer relations representative for Counter Culture Coffee. Enjoy her #symp2012 coverage all week long.

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