Like clockwork, every Saturday our intrepid intern Joanna Han (@joannakarenina) provides us with a delightful run-down of the best in This Week’s Sprudgery. We are going to write her such a nice letter of rec someday. Enjoy!

Let’s Talk Pergamino: While in Medellin, Colombia earlier this month for the Let’s Talk Coffee conference, your Sprudge editors had the pleasure of visiting an impressive new café called Pergamino, located in the trendy El Poblado district. Owned by coffee exporter, roaster, and barista Pedro Echaverria, the shop has a charming, modern aesthetic and serves Chemex, Japanese style iced coffee, and espresso off of a La Marzocco Strada MP. Many of the featured coffees come from the farm of Echaverria’s father, who just happens to be a coffee producer. We highly recommend a visit to Pergamino if you ever get a chance. In the meantime, here’s a little video we put together (the husky high-five was not staged):

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Let’s Talk Even More Let’s Talk Coffee Recaps: As a part of the LTC conference earlier this month, we attended a Robusta workshop led by Dr. Sunalini Menon of Coffeelab, Ltd. from Bangalore, India. Dr. Menon introduced us to the concept of fine robusta, and a cupping of several robustas followed. Our assessment: Most were not-so-tasty, but one — a high-elevation natural-processed Tanzanian — was surprisingly pleasant to drink. More than anything, though, it was a fantastic and unique experience. Below is a clip from the workshop, featuring Dr. Menon, Andrew Hetzel from Cafemakers, Sam Lewontin of Manhattan’s Everyman Espresso, and Adam McLellan of Sustainable Harvest:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Seattle Coffee On The History Channel: The History Channel’s web series, Food Tech: Side Orders, have posted an arguably cute but definitely outdated video about Seattle coffee. Watch for a younger, mustachioed version of Sprudge.com co-founder Zachary Carlsen at 2:17.

Coava Coffee Roasters On Tresplace: Coava Coffee Roasters was featured by TresPlace, a new Portland-based blog who are “discouraged by the content available” from all other worldly outlets for coffee writing. It sounds like their Applied Digital Storyweaving undergrad degrees from UC-Boulder (with minors in Holistic Start-Up Noosphere Strategies) hath prepared them well, at least for their outside hiring decisions. While much of the copy on the website itself is unreadable, the video they farmed out is pretty, and worth a watch.

Another Portland Microroaster: Our very own Portland, Oregon has another addition to its already rather saturated list of coffee roasters, and we were overjoyed to land noted author and journalist Hanna Neuschwander for her exclusive take on the topic. Launched by a fellow named Marty Lopes last week, Rosaline Coffee is a new boutique roasting company operating out of Portland’s inner SE. Using a brand new 1.5 kilo Proaster, Lopes roasts coffees in what he calls the “Northwest juice-balanced” style. His coffees can be found at Barista, where he’s previously spent time as a coffee buyer. Follow Mr. Lopes on Twitter for updates!

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The 10th annual edition of Let’s Talk Coffee has come and gone, and your trusty Sprudge.com editors were in full attendance live from Antioquia, Colombia, with access and on-site support made possible by the generosity of Sustainable Harvest. We tweeted, we took hundreds and hundreds of photos, and directly participated by hosting a panel of specialty coffee experts – four of the industry’s best and brightest who traveled to Colombia alongside us and told their stories to a packed house of producers, importers, finance experts, WalMart marketing staff, Colombian politicians, Sustainable Harvest staff, and assorted roasters from around the world.

28 unique countries were in attendance, from 6 continents – and we’re sure that just as soon as someone figures out how to grow or roast coffee in Antarctica, Sustainable Harvest will get them down to the next event. We’ve been endlessly jotting notes and snap snap snapping photos, so expect to hear more about our time in Colombia in the coming week, but today, before flying home, we wanted to share with you 5 thoughts we took away from our time at Let’s Talk Coffee.

1. Coffee is truly global.

This is not exactly a trenchant observation – there’s perhaps no industry more global, more far-flung than coffee – but it’s a fact that can be easy to forget as we go about the daily business of writing this website. The hands that grow and roast and connect the dots in the global coffee chain come in every imaginable hue, with business and innovation conducted in a babylon of languages. We’re aware of the fact that it’s kind of trite for us to call this a “takeaway”, but trust us, there is nothing, and we mean nothing that makes you more aware of the way coffee girdles the globe like attending a conference with the size and scope of Let’s Talk Coffee.

2. Robusta is indeed a big deal.

Robusta had a real seat at the table at Let’s Talk Coffee, and our Twitter coverage on this topic garnered hundreds of retweets and replies, some snarky, some exclamatory, and some just plain curious. We tried to approach the topic with an open mind, and came away learning that some of our preconceived notions about robusta were exactly that – preconceived, and based on reputation rather than on facts. Which is not to say that we’re about to run out and advocate that our roaster friends switch over to robusta right away. The “Fine Robusta Workshop” we attended, which was the very first of its kind outside of India, yielded plenty of skeptical looks and maybe a few heart palpitations – robusta does have twice the caffeine content of arabica after all, and we were cupping at 2000 meters. Still, to call the robusta cupping we attended “unique” is to be perilously guilty of understatement, and one of the 7 coffees we cupped – a naturally processed high elevation robusta from Tanzania – was cupped out by experts at around 82.5 to 83, yielding acetic, fruit-like characteristics and a cleanness in the cup wholly unexpected from the robusta samples we’d tried previously.

We learned that almost all the robusta we’d tasted before Let’s Talk Coffee was suffering from defects, or had been grown at low elevation, and arabica with those two characteristics can be every bit as gross. Still, the smell in the room as dozens and dozens of samples of robusta were ground is something that we’ll probably never be able to forget. A very unique and unusual opportunity indeed, and look for more robusta coverage on Sprudge in the coming days.

3. Let’s Talk Coffee is about building scale – ethically and sustainably.

From Ben and Jerry’s to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to WalMart, some of the biggest companies in the world see that sustainability is key to the coffee supply chain, and the way they tell (and sell) sustainability matters. Some of the people we met were genuinely inspiring, especially folks like Andy Barker, the Social Mission Specialist from Ben & Jerry’s, for whom advancing his company’s ethics and social interests is clearly an authentic passion. Ben & Jerry’s is owned by a massive company called Unilever, but a condition in their buyout requires this much larger company to report directly to a Ben & Jerry’s board that makes sure their company’s peaceful, mellow Vermont ethos is part and parcel with widespread distribution and a global supply reach. We learned a lot about Ben & Jerry’s from Mr. Barker’s presentation at Let’s Talk Coffee, and we came away from our time spent with him believing that Ben & Jerry’s commitment to ethical sustainability and Fair Trade certification is a very real and admirable thing.

4. The upper echelon of specialty coffee is but a drop in the global bucket.

There were folks at Let’s Talk Coffee whose companies roast six containers of coffee a day. And then there were our panel guests, the smallest of whom works for a two-store chain in Manhattan that sells 300 pounds a week. Even the bigger companies in the high-end specialty coffee game are mere garden gnomes compared to the likes of Green Mountain and WalMart, which is why it’s so fascinating that Sustainable Harvest was keen to give us a platform to highlight specialty coffee companies like Caffe Ladro, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cafe Sublime, and Everyman Espresso. What’s even more interesting is the way the room listened to what our guests had to say; our guest’s companies will never compete when it comes to volume, but quality is still a universal language that turns heads, from the big companies and especially from the producers alike, for whom a higher cherry price paid at origin is universal in its translation from English to Spanish, Portugese to Kinyarwanda. Kudos to Sustainable Harvest for giving the little guys a seat at the big kid’s table.

5. Let’s Talk Coffee is truly special.

This event was humbling in the same way a layover at the Amsterdam-Schipol Airport is humbling; Let’s Talk Coffee is a polyglot of languages, backgrounds, and roles in the supply chain that amounts to a coffee journalist’s dream. We’ve never before experienced a supply chain event with the size, scope, and history that equals what we saw at Let’s Talk Coffee, and it’s even more remarkable when you consider that Sustainable Harvest has been hosting this event for a decade. Where were you ten years ago? We were seniors in high school. You know what SustHarv was doing? They were throwing this event.

There’s some pretty troubling flexibility with the supply chain lexicon that gets bandied about the specialty coffee industry. Direct trade claims that conveniently forget the importer; companies who buy Fair Trade but don’t bother to label as such; and roasters for whom the daily ritual of cupping and re-cupping is a deletirious afterthought. But the “relationship coffee” model advanced by Sustainable Harvest has at its core a real and calculable body of evidence, which is to say, Let’s Talk Coffee is relationship coffee in action. You see it in the wide variety of attendees at the event (North Americans outnumbered by Peruvians, etc), and you see it in the intense, private meetings that went on all weekend away from the convention hall. You see it in the amount of business that gets done in one short weekend.

David Griswold (right) sits with Antioquia Governor Segio Fajardo (left).

You also see it as David Griswold dances the rhumba with producers at the after party, or in Adam McClellan’s effortless shift from English to Spanish and back again, mediating between North American buyers and Ecuadorian producers. We ourselves felt it first hand in the dozens of new connections and fresh conversations we had during our week in Medellin. Let’s Talk Coffee is a very modern event, but in the same breath it’s a kind of pre-technology festival of real human interaction, where the social networking happens over arepas instead of iPhones. We’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s our pleasure to be able to bring you words, pictures, and videos from our week in Medellin.

The post Let’s Talk Let’s Talk Coffee: 5 Takeaways appeared first on Sprudge.com.

It’s true! We’re reporting to you live from beautiful Medellin, Colombia, where the mornings are clear and cool, and the evenings pop with cloudy zaps of lightning. We’ve traveled here as guests of Sustainable Harvest, to take part in the 10th anniversary of their annual Let’s Talk Coffee conference, an event that brings together producers, roasters, quality specialists, global financial experts, major investors, and industry thought leaders for a week of discussion, presentations, and new connections. We’ll be covering the event all week long with videos and essays and Tweets (the wi-fi works great), and later today we’re hosting what should be a lively and informative panel session with some of the brightest, most fascinating folks in specialty coffee.

The topic of our panel is: “Entrepreneurship and Experimentation in North American Cafes.”

Our Panel guests:

• Fabrizio Sencion-Ramirez: Two-time Mexican Barista Champion, and runner up in the 2012 WBC, Mr. Sencion-Ramirez works mornings as a roaster for his own boutique roasterie, Cafe Sublime, and evenings as a lead barista at 5PM, a bustling specialty cafe in Guadalajara.
• Jared Linzmeier: From humble beginnings washing dishes for Intelligentsia Silver Lake, Jared Linzmeier progressed up the chain from barista to roaster, quality control specialist to regional wholesale manager. In 2011 he amicably departed Intelligentsia to become Director of Coffee and green buyer for Seattle’s revitalized Caffe Ladro.
• Sam Lewontin: One of the smartest young minds in specialty coffee, Sam Lewontin got his start at Equal Exchange in Seattle, before moving to New York City to spearhead OTG Management’s World Bean airport cafe program. These days he’s the manager and education director for Everyman Espresso, running operations at their newly opened SoHo location and making delicious Counter Culture Coffee on the daily.
• Stephen Vick: A Sprudgie-award winner with deep roots in the specialty coffee industry, Mr. Vick’s Zelig-like resume places him in crucial positions throughout specialty coffee’s immense decade of growth. He’s worked with companies like Zoka, Stumptown, Sustainable Harvest, Intelligentsia, and now Blue Bottle Coffee, where today he manages quality control at their Oakland headquarters. His Capote-esque wit and broad base of knowledge has made him a longtime favorite of this website, and we’re delighted to have him on our panel.

Do we sound excited for this panel? Good, because we are – sleeping was hard last night, and not just ‘cos of jet lag. Watch for coverage and recaps all week long on Sprudge, as we report live from Let’s Talk Coffee in Medellin.

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Part one of two pretty exciting announcements we get to make today: Sprudge.com has been invited by Sustainable Harvest to take part in this year’s 10th anniversary edition of their annual Let’s Talk Coffee conference.

For those of you unfamiliar with Let’s Talk Coffee, it’s one of the coffee industry’s premier events for promoting direct relationships up and down the coffee chain, from producers to roasters and everyone in-between. This year’s LTC event will be held in the suburbs of Medellin, Colombia. Here’s more from Sustainable Harvest’s official LTC website:

Let’s Talk Coffee 2012 will be held in the state of Antioquia, Colombia, just outside of the vibrant city of Medellin. Against the backdrop of this new and exciting specialty coffee destination, this year’s event will highlight topics such as new financing and traceability methods, evolving business models, the next generation of farm-direct relationships, exemplary quality, and best practices among coffee suppliers from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

By fostering direct conversations among coffee industry partners, Sustainable Harvest cultivates a community of trust that results in higher quality coffee and reliability throughout the supply chain. During this year’s private four-day event, participants will discuss and debate pressing issues and challenges, taste and calibrate coffee quality and dive into hands-on trainings and workshops.

We would have been stoked just to attend, but Sprudge.com is absolutely delighted to have been asked to present at this year’s Let’s Talk Coffee conference, where we’ll be conducting a live interview panel titled “The Next Generation: Entrepreneurship and Experimentation In North American Cafes.” Confirmed panel guests include:

• Sam Lewontin, Everyman Espresso (NYC)
• Jared Linzmeier, Caffe Ladro (Seattle)
• Fabricio Sencion-Ramirez, Cafe Sublime (Guadelajara)
• Stephen Vick, Blue Bottle Coffee (Oakland / NYC)

In addition to hosting the above panel, we’ll be providing exclusive LTC coverage that week on Sprudge, bringing you a rare and live look inside Let’s Talk Coffee’s remarkable schedule of presenters and events. Plus the event is happening in Medellin, Colombia’s beautiful, wild, sophisticated 2nd largest city. Once known as “the most dangerous city in the world”, modern Medellin has come a long way since the days of Pablo Escobar, and we’ll be exploring, filming, and writing about the city in great detail during our time there (and reading a lot of Jack Magazine in the run-up to our trip).

Stoked! Check out this sweet video from last year’s LTC:

Let’s Talk Coffee is sponsored by Sustainable Harvest, and happens October 4th-7th.

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The Ecotrust Building is gorgeous centuries-old industrial warehouse, fully restored in the late 1990s and chock full of charming shops, eateries, and outstanding views of urban Portland from its public rooftop mezzanine. It was the first LEED-certified restoration of a historic building, and now, with the Red E on the first floor and the headquarters of Sustainable Harvest occupying much of the third floor, the Ecotrust Building has become a major destination for coffee sightseeing during this year’s SCAA event.

Keith Miller, co-owner of The Red E, surveys his new terrain.

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