Symposium Colloquium: Peter Giuliano, SCAA Symposium Director

Peter Giuliano has been one of the Specialty Coffee Association of America‘s Symposium advocates and architects from the very beginning. This year, he sat for the first time as the Symposium’s director, and the bold new direction for Symposium was palpable – the venue had a certain gravitas, the lighting was sexier, the talks were buzzier, and the enhancement of interaction has been heightened to new levels.

For the first time in its five year run, all of the Symposium talks will be released online, in an effort to make the event more interactive for the wider public. Part of that interactivity is our own Symposium Colloquium series, bite-sized interview morsels with each of the speakers at Symp2013 that will run alongside Symposium content all year long. In the second installment of Symposium Colloquium, we ask Peter about his new role, his visions for the future, and why Symp 2013 was a resounding success.

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This episode, like the new Symposium, is shorter, buzzier, and enhances interactivity. Watch our video before watching Mr. Giuliano’s 2013 Symposium welcome address, “The Coffee Symposium”, which was released today over at the SCAA Symposium website. Here’s more from that video’s release:

“In his welcome address for the 2013 Symposium, Peter Giuliano starts at the beginning. The idea of Symposium came from the ancient Greeks, who recognized the power of coming together to drink and discuss ideas and views. The beverage consumed at the Greek symposium- wine- had some negative effects on the tradition, and the Greek idea of symposium fizzled out in antiquity. Peter argues that the Ethiopian tradition of drinking coffee together is a different kind of symposium, this time built around coffee. He traces the spread of coffee consumption from Ethiopia to Arabia and the rest of the world, and points out that wherever coffee spread, intellectual and political development followed shortly thereafter. This idea takes flight from there – touching on neuroscience, architecture, and computer science to support the assertion that coffee – and the connections that coffee creates- actually make us smarter and stronger.”