Some swell content to share with you from the Sprudge HQ. As covered in a previous post, some of the best blogging last weekend took place far from Anaheim. Cruise on over to the 2010 USBC Blog and get an in-depth recap of the Mike Phillips routine that won it all:
He asks judges to start with the washed processed. Then swirl the honey processed taste, and give it a vigorous swirl with the date reduction. Then he takes the hot and spicy full natural and asks them to take one long slow sip and enjoy and get the ginger on the nose.
Sig course down at 14:25. He cleans up and organizes. Finishes with a thank you and talks about the connection between barista, farmers and roasters and calls “time” as the clock ticks to 15:00 even. Big cheers from the crowd.
Moving along…in the spirit of mopping up, we’ll call attention to a little bit of ongoing Gorilla Coffee controversy that spilled over onto the SCAA showroom floor. It seems that ex-Gorilla Coffee baristas were in attendance, and they provoked something of a confrontation with one Jaime Vandura, accusations that showed up initially on the Coffeea Cultura blog, and were brought to our attention by FIPS. Unfortunately your Sprudge.com editors did not encounter embittered ex-Gorilla guerillas; we wish we had, because the whole thing sounds juicy.
But the real juicy stuff is up on the main page of Coffea Cultura. In a new post, Mr. Vandura eviscerates “so-called Specialty Coffee” culture’s current status. The whole thing is positively Brewtbart-esque! It seems Mr. Vandura was so disgusted by the events at this year’s SCAA Symposium he was unable to so much as press “record” on his minidisk player:
The state of so-called Specialty Coffee is degrading with each passing harvest season. If the SCAA conference can be used as a gauge, the ship is not only sinking, it has indeed already sunk. The paltry offerings in terms of education, one might theorize, are due to the creation of Symposium, where the “brightest stars of Specialty coffee” meet. Unfortunately, that too is a train wreck of aimless presentations…
…avoid the hopeless and abusively mind-numbing atmosphere of “Specialty coffee.” The term is dead to me, and at CC we will use it no more from this day forward.
…please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
To end on a lighter note, we’re glad to pass along this lovely little handwritten list of this year’s finalists. In this digital age there’s nothing quite as pleasing as the look of pen on paper…
