Homeward Bound, Denver & Home

I thought I would blog a lot more than I have on this trip.  The truth is that we were on the go most of the time, and up late every night, so there wasn’t really any opportunity to keep the blog up to date.  Having said that, there is plenty of fodder for blog posts bumping around inside of my head; which will undoubtedly find its way onto the screen in the weeks and months to come.  I am currently writing this post on a plane traveling between San Jose, Costa Rica and Denver.  We are on our way home, and I hopefully will be able to post this when we land in Denver, and if not when I get home.

The trip overall was amazing, and we learned so much.  Learning in the true sense of the word, acquiring understanding of both the good things and the not so good things.  In all honesty, Costa Rica was the hi-light.  I went to Costa Rica with very little in the way of expectations.  Costa Rican coffee in my past experience has not been very good.  It has never been terrible, but it has, in my opinion, never been great either.  With that said, we were treated to Costa Rica the only way one should see it – first hand – and the view was amazing.  Not only is the countryside amazingly beautiful but the micro mills that we visited were very impressive.  All of this would be a bit redundant unless, as it was, the coffee was amazing too.  Last night we celebrated a cupping with Ryan Brown from Ritual Coffee Roasters (San Francisco) along with the crew from Exclusive Coffees.  Out of 17 coffees we cupped, all of them were at least an 85 and 4-5 of the coffees were 90+.  This is a stark contrast from my previous cuppings of Costa Rica coffee, including COE cuppings.  The work that Francisco and Tim are doing with the micro producers is quite amazing and their efforts are worthy of being illuminated within the broader specialty coffee industry.  It should be noted that one of the highest scoring coffees on the table last night was the Mamacata Honey Geisha produced by my friend Jose David.  This coffee was like drinking blueberry pie in a cup and it scored between 92 and 93 points.

It is an exciting time in the world of specialty coffee.  The world is getting smaller all of the time.  On this trip we met and developed relationships with amazing people, like  Michael and Laura Johnson of Johnson Brothers Coffee, Maura Harrington from Flying Goat Coffee, and Andy Newborn from Barefoot Coffee, among numerous others.  People in the industry are working on exciting new projects like Square Mile Coffee Roasters and Marco ___ constantly focusing on how we as an industry can produce and present coffee in ways, which inspire and excite.  The bottom line is that it remains focused on quality coffee, those who produce it and those of us fortunate enough to have careers where we get to play instead of work.