The San Francisco Barista Nation event is happening this Saturday! If you’re a Bay Area Coffee Professional, there’s no reason not to go – but be quick about it and email baristanation@gmail.com for signup information. The organizers of BN have put together a lot of smart presentations. Here’s our agenda for January 14th:
Leave Sprudge Bay Area HQ by 8:00AM. It’s about a two mile walk to the event space from Hayes Valley, way out by the ball field, so we’ll hit up Sightglass on the way to 535 Bryant Street.
Get there by 9AM so we can enjoy a pastry or two and have some coffee early before the Keynote speech at 9:30AM. At 10:30, we have to make a choice between two Discovery talks: “Build A Coffee Bar” and “The Benefits of Unique Architecture and Design”. Build A Coffee Bar will be hosted by Sauro Dal Aglio, Italian Cup Champion. Unfortunately, his talk is trumped by what is sure to be a fascinating look at modern cafe architecture with the brains behind Boor Bridges, who’ve been involved with the build-out of Four Barrel Coffee and Sightglass. Talks start at 10:30.
Development begins promptly at 11:30. You’ve got a choice between Tom Vincent’s discussion on espresso craft and Brant Curtis’ talk on the future of filter coffee and batch brewing. Baristas will undoubtedly get a lot out of Texas Coffee School’s Vincent while cafe owners and trainers will want to hear what Curtis has to say. Noted apocalyptic soothsayer James Hoffmadamus predicted 2012 will be the year of the batch brew, and we can’t agree more.
1:00PM will break for lunch. Meet you at the salad bar.
Discovery part two starts at 1:30, where you must decide between Gabriel Cole’s Barista Business Tools and Anne Nylander’s Developing a Menu’s Workflow Strategies. Anne Nylander has been consulting for years and her insight on developing a successful slow bar will be interesting for those wanting to implement such a feature in their cafe.
Development part two begins after a short break at 3PM, where we’ll be at the Fair Trade Round Table. Devorah of Equator Coffee will be leading a class on drink building, which for baristas will be gold, but the next phase of Fair Trade USA will be fascinating to discuss. This should be a real highlight of the event.
To cap off a long day of talks, Sprudge pal Louie Poore will be in charge of a Coffee Bar Blueprint Competition.
At 6:30PM there’s a reception. We’ll be downing glasses of house wine and passing out in our cab home at around 9ish. See you there!
For those of you who won’t be able to make it, we’ll be live-tweeting, live-blogging, and live-David Rio Chai tasting all day long. Stick to Sprudge.com for all the juiciest details from Barista Nation SF.
