Competition on the Brain

I have been spending a lot of time watching barista competitions online this past week.  It started with the UKBC championship early in the week, and now I am stuck in front of my computer watching the USBC championship; the finals are on tomorrow.  Apart from watching, I have been thinking about the upcoming competitions in Canada in the next 6 months.  As far as I know, the Prairies Regional Barista Championships are going to be held in Calgary again, back at the Fretello house, which was a great venue last year.  They did us all proud, and were great hosts.  This year, if indeed they do host once again, we will all have the Slayer to play on, as a forth machine.  Speaking of which, Chad and Josh are heading down to Cowtown later this month to go play on the new Slayer, so stay tuned for a Transcend review in the next couple of weeks.  The CNBC (Canadian National Barista Championship) are being held in Vancouver this year on October 20-21 and it should be fun as always.  Part of the reason for this post is to throw out an invite to those in the Prairies region, who might want to start talking about this years competition.  The more volunteers we can get out the better.  Watching the USBC online, I think that we can raise the bar on how we pull off the 2009PRBC and to that end, I have purchased a couple of domain names for the event so that we can properly promote and stream the event live.  It would be great if we could get a regional committee together to properly promote the event, secure some great and meaningful sponsorship, so that the event rocks the specialty coffee world not only in Canada but everywhere.  I think that we can do a lot with the 2009PRBC and with good lead time, get some better press this year.  It is the one event in the prairies where we get a chance to expose the rest of our little world to really great coffee.  So if you have ideas or are interested in what I am writing about, flip me and email and lets see where this goes.