Craft, for me, has become a bit of a dirty word. It should be a positive word. It should indicate a degree of skill and care, the mark of a skilled professional in tune with his task. However, it seems to have gained a somewhat widespread use in coffee circles as a defensive argument against the adoption of more scientific control of parameters, whether brewing or roasting. While I accept that certain individuals can achieve good degrees of consistency through acutely tuned combinations of their senses, a greater majority seem to use the craft argument as a convenient opt-out.
Musings on Coffee Culture From Ireland
For the last 12-18 months, it seems there has been a steady succession of challenges and activities to occupy my focus: the 2009 Irish Barista Championship (judging and coaching), WBC Atlanta (coaching), getting the Uber Project blog off the ground, attending the Gold Cup course (while it only took a day, it maintained my interest for weeks), the Irish Cupping Competition, 3FE opening etc. Though I remain involved in a couple of ongoing coffee-related projects, there has been a recent absence of something meaty, challenging.
Despite a dearth of personal and professional free time, I find myself longing for something to obsess over, something to push me out of my comfort zone. That something I hope, is the 2010 Irish Barista Championships, this time, however, as a competitor.
Ok, so I got a gift of an aeropress at Christmas, something which I already own. I can no longer bear to see its boxed visage in the kitchen.
So to remedy this situation I am asking that people respond in the comments with suggested captions for the below image.
I’m giving up predicting things. My predictions for the Brazil CoE, frankly, did not correlate well with reality. So this addendum will focus on simple observations, while clairvoyance will take a backseat.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. The Cup of Excellence is now in its third decade of existence. That, while technically true, is also quite misleading, given that last summer was its tenth anniversary. Nonetheless, that is a striking amount of time for a competition that kicked-off humbly in Brazil in 1999, with the number one coffee receiving what would now seem a very modest $2.60 high bid, while other coffees received only a fraction above the commodity price of the time. The competition has matured enormously, spread to 9 countries (including one-night stand Rwanda), and record prices for those countries have been set and broken in the process.