Put a little mid-century bossa nova jazz on the Tivoli, and let your mind float away to a tropical place, as Intelligentsia Coffee’s globe-spanning annual “Extraordinary Coffee Workshop” kicks off tomorrow in Brazil. This is the 5th ECW event hosted by Intelli, focused on promoting connectivity and forging relationships with producers from around the world. In years past the even has been held in Colombia, El Salvador, Los Angeles and Chicago.
We attended the third ECW event in LA in 2011 (relive that coverage here), alongside fellow media observer (and now Sprudge LA desk chief) Julie Wolfson, writing for Cool Hunting. It was, no hyperbole, a pretty extraordinary event, where we met producers from all around the world, and enjoyed a memorable and wildly international final evening at the Saarloos and Sons winery in Los Olivos, California.
As Lionel Hampton’s “Bossa Nova Jazz” flips over to Side Two, Intelligentsia’s Director of Communications Stephen Morrissey shares more via e-mail:
We’ll begin ECW 2013 in Poços de Caldas, in the municipality of São Sebastiao da Grama, with our friends at Bourbon Specialty Coffee. We then travel east to Carmo de Minas where our friends and veteran ECW attendees Luiz Paulo Pereira and Jacques Carneiro run Carmo Coffees. We will explore their farms, state of the art cupping labs and see first hand how these two producers process hundreds of thousands of sacks of specialty coffee every year.
Brazil’s coffee industry is remarkably diverse, with many tiny farms growing on steep mountainsides similar to other countries, but also very large, flat farms at lower altitudes that use a lot of modern tools to harvest. This ECW will introduce our pioneering coffee producers to each.
The primary goal of ECW is to unite growers who have made a serious commitment to quality and create a forum to share knowledge. We want to build a network of farmer-to-farmer support, through which the best ideas and innovations being pioneered by visionary growers around the world can be exchanged.
It’s a producer-focused event, to be sure, but observers in the general public can follow along from home (perhaps with a cool coffee caipirinha in hand) using the hashtag #ECW2013 on Instagram and Twitter.
