First Place

19 August, 2007

As mentioned previously, I was able to get to the Roasters Guild retreat again this year. I am writing this from the lobby of Ruttger's Sugar Lake Lodge after learning the results of the team competition.

The competition this year involved simply producing the best roast of each of three coffees: one from Costa Rica, one from Guatemala, and one from Ethiopia. I had the pleasure of being on Team los Guapos with John Rapinchuk, Jess Arnsteen, Keith Tomlinson, Thomas Lussier, Ken Julian, Michael McGuire, and Mike Love. This was a fantastic team. We started by roasting two pounds of each in a production roaster, pulling four samples of each coffee at various points in the roast, maintaining meticulous records (we caught a lot of looks with my MacBook Pro running the timer program I use at the shop sitting on the roaster). We then cupped these coffees and roasted two potential submission batches of each coffee, again keeping very good records. This is very similar to the methodology we use here and the results were fantastic.

Our Ethiopian took first place with the highest average score of any coffee in the competition (89.7). Our Guatemalan came in second place with an average score of 88 points. Aside from roasting, we also needed to produce a mission statement. Ours came in fifth. In the preliminary cupping round, Team los Guapos came in first place and we also came in first place in the final cupping today with a combined average score of 83.73 points.

I had a lot of fun here, there was an excellent educational program this year, and there were a lot of great conversations with others in the coffee business. I will be back in the shop tomorrow.

UPDATE: 24 August, 2007: Press release now available (PDF).