Just on the horizon, for the second time Coffee Common will bring its signature specialty coffee experience to TED. Roasters are being announced daily over on Coffee Common’s website – early announcements include Equator Coffees (Norcal), Seven Seeds (Melbourne), and Phil and Sebastian (Calgary). Baristas will be drawn from past Coffee Common rosters.
Baristas will have the opportunity to serve a concentration of anthropologists, architects, educators, ethnobotanists, futurists, the director of DARPA, visualizers, Brent Fortune, the winner of the U.S. Memory Championship, designers, surgeons, journalists, Nobelists, peace activists, economists, philosophers, novelists, linguists, psychologists, a teen choir, physicists, social psychologists, climatologists, teachers, thinkers, doers, and many, many more.
Sprudge.com is MOST ASSUREDLY NOT ON THE LIST for TED 2012, but we’ll comb the invited blogs for all the pics, froth and gossip over cocktails at Moloko in North Portland. Which barista will serve Bill Clinton? Who remains on the list of lucky roasters? Only time will tell.
But this business about Coffee Common and TED has us a bit retro-nostalgic for the whiz-bang afternoon we spent at Coffee Common NYC. What started as a coffee service for TED was, for one wild week in Chelsea, given ample fertilizer and allowed to blossom into the TED of coffee service. Certain magic moments stand out from our visit: an engaging and informational woodneck tutelage from Counter Culture’s Jesse Kahn; the expert handling of Coffee Common’s milk & sugar experiment from Erin Meister, also of Counter Culture; being expressly denied bathroom privileges by the door gals from A Startup Store, then having said bathroom privileges graciously reinstated by Jenny Moylan; marveling at the individual time and care each barista took with his or her individual attendees throughout the day; and basking in the presence of the Coffee Common Executive Council as they formed together in a Voltron-esque display, with Brian as the hands, Sean as the brains, Stephen as the mouth, and Brent as the bedazzled ruby crown to top it all off.
Coffee Common NYC was great, and they’re only going to get better. There’s certainly a version of the future where not all, but most of these guys are promoting, planning, and executing CC full-time, and by God, won’t that be a specialty coffee Death Star? Coffee Common will be blogging, tweeting and perhaps Google+ Hanging throughout the TED week. You can follow along at CoffeeCommon.com.
As for the rest of us…another Moloko Mule, please.
