Coffee

It’s true! The 2018 London Coffee Festival kicks off in just a few short days, bringing with it the sights, sounds, smells and slurps of the world’s premiere consumer coffee event. This is Sprudge Media’s astounding fourth consecutive year attending and covering the event, and we’re thrilled to be back again for a wild whirligig of a good time in the city that never sleeps…er, the city that sleeps after a nice long lunch.

That would be London, global capital of coffee culture (with heaps of great wine). It’s a city that leads the world in cafe cool, and at the center of it all sits the London Coffee Festival. What began in 2011 as a new event is today Europe’s leading coffee festival, drawing exhibitors from across the UK and EU and more than 30,000 attendees annually. It is a hot bed of brand exhibitions and product launches—the work we do covering London Coffee Festival each spring informs content all year long on Sprudge.

An important facet of the fest is its work with Project Waterfall, an international water charity focusing on bringing drinkable water to coffee growing communities. 50% of ticket sales at this year’s festival will be donated to Project Waterfall. This ethical approach to hosting coffee festivals is inspiring and a big part of why we’re proud to continue supporting the London Coffee Festival in 2018.

So what’s on at the fest? Heaps, to put it mildly. There is of course the 4th annual running of the Coffee Masters Tournament at London Coffee Festival. This year’s tournament promises to be the biggest and best yet, drawing an international cadre of top flight competitors to the stage at LCF. Sprudge Media Network has expanded its coverage of the Masters this season to include live content via the Sprudge Live Twitter and web hubs—you’ll be able to follow up to the minute coverage from the event all weekend long, with coverage supported by Cafe Imports, Acaia, Assembly Coffee, Oatly UK, and Faema. Follow Sprudge Live on Twitter and visit our Sprudge Live coverage hub for content all weekend long form London.

The showfloor itself is an enviably deep bench of brand activations, product launches, pop-up bars, and educational opportunities. It’s hard to figure out where to start with the highlights, but we’ll do our best by diving straight in.

• Gruppo Cimbali are showing up big at this year’s festival, sponsoring a series of bar experiences including The Benchmark Bar, The Sensory Bar, and the Coffee Mixologist Sensory Series, featuring 2018 Coffee Mixologist champions Vito Sportelli and Andrea Peconio.

• La Marzocco UK’s popular True Artisan Cafe experience is back, featuring an ever-rotating roster of top roasters from across the UK, Europe and beyond. Expect a focus on signature drinks and espresso blends, and stop by throughout the festival—there’s always something new on the bar.

• The Tasting Room is set to offer an innovative series of experiences throughout the event, including exhibitions by Union Hand-Roasted, Origin Coffee, and Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood.

• The Roasters Village takes place over two floors this year, bringing together a who’s who of UK and European coffee leaders from brands like Koppi, Small Batch Coffee Roasters, Clifton Coffee Roasters, Allpress Espresso, and many more.

• The Lab is boasting perhaps its most robust collection of speakers in festival history. Across a stunning series of talks and panels you learn from the likes of Tim Wendelboe, BBC Good Food writer Miriam Nice, Richard Corney and Jessie May Peters of Raw Material, home coffee roasting expert Geoff Woodley of Ikawa, Coffee Masters champion James Wise, Curators Coffee co-founder Catherine Seay, and many, many more.

• A lively and surprise-filled exhibitors showfloor featuring pop-up cafes, cuppings, hot new gear, and much, much more.

And that’s just scratching the surface! There’s also epic off-site parties from the likes of Mavam (Thursday), Sprudge Wine (Thursday), and many more events to come. There’s also an epic OATLY takeover at Boxpark from Monday April 9th thru Sunday April 15th, featuring free oat milk lattes, prize drawings, an epic latte art throwdown on Wednesday the 11th, and complimentary “Big Leb-Oat-Ski” (!) cocktails on Friday and Saturday night. If you’re hosting an off-site party or event during London Coffee Festival and would like it listed on Sprudge, please get in contact.

We’ll see you in London at the 2018 London Coffee Festival!

Sprudge Media Network’s coverage of the 2018 London Coffee Festival is supported by Cafe Imports, Acaia, Assembly Coffee, Oatly UK, and Faema.

All London Coffee Festival coverage on Sprudge. 

Photos by James Bryant for London Coffee Festival. 

The post The 2018 London Coffee Festival Is Coming appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The La Marzocco Cafe—the Sprudgie Award winning Seattle coffee shop and showroom inside the KEXP Studios—has announced their Year Three Roasters in Residence, and there’s a pretty signficant international bent to this year’s lineup.

Like with previous years, each roaster gets to takeover the cafe for a month; this isn’t just a guest roaster spot, mind you, this is a wholesale change. Roasters decide the drink menu, bar design, flow, etc., in order to provide patrons a cafe experience that most resembles that of the roaster’s home shop.

For Year Three—though really it is Year Three and Four-ish, running from May 2018 through February 2020—the La Marzocco Cafe has tapped seven international roasters of the 20 total to inhabit the KEXP coffee shop. The international list includes: Allpress Espresso (Auckland, New Zealand), Seesaw Coffee (Shanghai, China), Bonanza Coffee Roasters (Berlin, Germany), Onibus Coffee (Tokyo, Japan), Ditta Artiginale (Florence, Italy), The Coffee Collective (Copenhagen, Denmark), and Five Elephant (Berlin, Germany).

For US-based roasters, La Marzocco has selected: Cuvée Coffee (Austin,TX), La Colombe Coffee Roasters (Philadelphia, PA), Kuma Coffee (Seattle, WA), Metric Coffee (Chicago, IL), Dapper and Wise (Portland, OR), Equator Coffees & Teas (San Rafael, CA), Port of Mokha (Oakland, CA), 4th Dimension Coffee (Durham, NC), Elixr Coffee (Philadelphia, PA),  Onda Origins (Seattle, WA),  Linea Caffe (San Francisco, CA), Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters (Lakewood, CO) and Verve Coffee Roasters (Santa Cruz, CA). That last two are my mom’s favorite coffee roasters, just in case you thought your parents’ coffee game was better than my mom’s. It isn’t. Hi Mom!

It all kicks off with next month with Cuvée Coffee. Will they bring with them their assembly-line style of drink ordering (featured here in Sprudge) or will Cuvée owner Mike McKim stand in front of the cafe slinging cans of nitro cold brew to passersby (a thing he has been known to do)? Who knows. Maybe both. That’s the fun of the La Marzocco Cafe. For more information about the Roaster in Residence program, view the announcement of the Year Three residents via the La Marzocco Cafe and Showroom official website.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

*top image via La Marzocco

The post La Marzocco Cafe Announces Roasters In Residence For Year Three appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

On Wednesday, March 28th 2018, a California judge tentatively ruled that coffee must come with a cancer warning label in the state of California. If you work in coffee, you definitely heard about this, but it’s been a hot topic in the mainstream media as well, making for features in The New York Times, CNN, NPR, BBC, and even Snopes, a website dedicated to fact checking urban myths. But this is no fable; the ruling is for real, and now leading California coffee companies are left wondering what new costs and regulations the next few months might have in store for them.

The decision came after a lawsuit that’s been underway since 2008, when the California nonprofit Council for Education and Research on Toxics filed suit against Starbucks and dozens of other coffee purveyors under the 1986 Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, which requires companies with over 10 employees to warn their customers about the presence of carcinogens or toxins in their products. The carcinogen in question is known as acrylamide, a chemical compound produced during the coffee roasting process, which, when isolated (ie. not actually consumed inside coffee) has been shown in massive doses to cause cancer in animals, and is therefore found on California’s list of chemicals known to cause cancer. The question the lawsuit sought to answer was whether this chemical is truly harmless in coffee, and the burden of proof fell on coffee purveyors—who, the judge said, were unable to prove that acrylamide in coffee posed no significant health risk, as reported by Associated Press and others.

This decision arrives at odds with a growing body of medical research showing that coffee is not only harmless, it actually provides significant health benefits and reduces cancer risk, including reports from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, National Center for Biotechnology Information, and American Gastroenterology Association. Even the American Institute for Cancer Research has stated decisively that coffee does not need a cancer warning because scientists say it protects from cancer. The coffee trade organizations National Coffee Association and Specialty Coffee Association have both put out responses condemning the tentative ruling and providing resources for coffee people whose families, friends, coworkers, and customers may have questions about coffee’s carcinogenic potential.

It’s not quite over yet; the judge has given coffee companies a few weeks to file objections before the tentative ruling is finalized. Some defendants in the coffee lawsuit have already settled, including 7-Eleven, and a third phase could determine civil penalties of up to $2,500 per person exposed each day over eight years.

So where does all of this leave coffee companies? This lawsuit went after large companies with legal teams and substantial funds, but what about the small businesses that make up the vast majority of California coffee? I spoke to a small handful of coffee company owners and managers across California to hear their reactions and concerns.

Tony Konecny of Yes Plz in Los Angeles reports already seeing labeling from bigger coffee companies since the ruling dropped last Wednesday, including a sign on the bar of Intelligentsia’s Silver Lake location. “I’m assuming any company with money will know they’re a potential target and be proactive; I just wonder what’s going to happen to the little guys.” He also raised concerns around the optics of shipping roasted product from CA to the other parts of the country. “For my business, I don’t know what the impacts are going to be.”

Brian Gomez of The Roasted Bean in San Dimas also expressed uncertainty around potential impacts, but he expressed confidence that coffee lovers will continue to place their trust in the many studies that demonstrate the positive impacts of coffee consumption, as well as their coffee purveyors. “When customers ask, I give them my honest opinion and I make sure to say that it’s my opinion. Based on everything I’ve read, it is safe to drink—not only safe but beneficial. Honestly, if I didn’t believe in my heart that coffee was safe, I wouldn’t be in the coffee business.”

San Diego-based Cafe Virtuoso’s Savannah Phillips agrees that this likely won’t have a huge impact on whether or not current coffee consumers skip their daily brew: “I consider this a non-issue that will have very little or no impact on our business. Coffee drinkers will not change their habits because we are a pretty smart group of individuals.”

Kyle Glanville of G&B Coffee in LA expressed similar frustration at the perceived baselessness of the warning labels. “If the goal is a more informed consumer, mission not accomplished; what an incomplete story to tell consumers. I mean, that’s the thing about coffee, right? It’s almost too good to be true; you can drink so much of it every day and it only makes your life better, and it doesn’t give you cancer—that’s why we love it! It’s a unicorn product.”

Sam Sobolewski of Bartavelle Coffee and Wine Bar in Berkeley echoed the sentiment: “It would be nice if these labels reflected some sort of scientific consensus, but since they do not I will happily tell my customers that we have no idea what it’s all about.”

Wendy Warren of Chromatic Coffee in San Jose is less worried; she’s currently ahead of the game, having put up signs in her Santa Clara cafe a couple years ago. “No one has even commented on it. There’s so much good news health-wise out on coffee that we’re not expecting a change in consumption, just the added cost due to labeling changes.”

Both Glanville and Konecny expressed hopes to see major coffee trade organizations take on the battle of appealing this—as NCA has stated they may—and providing the necessary resources for small companies to get organized. “It feels like if you want to do business you’re just in open water surrounded by sharks,” said Glanville, expressing frustration that a safe, beneficial product like coffee could be targeted as a safety concern while dangerous weapons still abound on the open market. “There are people out there who litigate for a living, and right now it seems like small companies could end up very exposed without the resources to protect themselves.”

It’s early days yet, but the people who will face the real impacts of this new legislation have legitimate concerns around how this will affect not only their costs and operations, but also the public perception of coffee in the long run. But, despite the challenges this ruling may bring, each of the business owners I spoke with are hopeful that no matter what, coffee drinkers will continue to follow the research and enjoy their favorite caffeinated beverage, warning sign be damned.

RJ Joseph is a staff writer for Sprudge Media Network. Read more RJ Joseph on Sprudge.

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Source: Coffee News