Saturday, January 17, 2004


scaa hangs with meetup.com

and i learned some really cool news yesterday! the scaa is hooking up with meetup.com!

this means we scaa consumer members are now all set to hang with the coffee.meetup.com crowd!

the next coffee meetup is feb.2 at 7pm at a coffeehouse near you. i've placed an scaa c-member-related item on the agenda for approval.

so no matter who you are or where you are, run over to meetup.com and sign up to vote on where to hold your coffee meetup. signing up to meetup.com is totally free. all you need are 5 people in your area to agree to attend, and your coffee party's on!

as soon as i can get the supporting documents, i hope to place an item related to specialty coffee month there as well. the theme i think will be "adventures in coffee."

and adventure is the right word; certainly nothing can match the exotic and romantic reality of coffee. at first this may seem like hyperbole.

but the more you learn about coffee the greater the lure and excitement you appreciate in the world's most intellectual and seductive beverage!

i know some scaa pro members -- roaster/retailers & coffeehouse owners -- hang out here on my blog, which i deeply appreciate. so while you're here, let me encourage you to sign up with meetup.com so we can organize events at your locations.

i believe there is a special rate for scaa pro members to list themselves at meetup.com as a venue -- iirc, it's just US$59 a month. you'll quickly make this back in US$4 lattes in a single meetup, i think!

i'm so excited about this i can hardly sit still long enough to drink this morning's "platinum blonde" blend (from gimme) cappuccino!

the platinum blonde is a medium-roast espresso with a strong sweetly spicy fragrance and a caramelly-syrupy aftertaste. it has some darkish roasty notes as well. yummy!

in other fantastic news, i had a great talk with jessica from batdorf. one of my many coffee articles came out last week in which i recommended her coffee, my much-beloved dancing goat blend, among several others.

i think c-members should be excited about the ideas batdorf has for working with us and offering us benefits -- such a pro-level educational coffee tastings, known as cuppings. these would definitely happen in their olympia, washington location, and possibly also in their atlanta, ga. branch.

stay tuned! also on the cupping front, peter of counterculture seems to have firmly committed himself to holding speakerphone cuppings for scaa c-members this spring.

it might work out that we go over to his new website once it's up, sign up for the cupping, buy the cupping sample for a nominal fee plus postage, and then dial in to cup along in a giant conference call.

everyone can talk and discuss the coffee(s) as we follow along with the cupping at home. i've done this with peter myself, as long-time readers may recall, and it is much more fun and effective than you might at first suppose.

highly recommended!

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