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"Our goal [at Soyuz] is to spread knowledge to coffee consumers. I believe everybody deserves to have a good and correctly brewed cup of coffee. Russian people love to drink coffee." drink for us, and coffee had a second place in my life. When I was younger, I was drinking coffee mostly when I was studying for exams at university. SA: What is your earliest memory of coffee as a child? AY: When I was a kid, I loved to eat the coffee grounds, which is called telve, the stuff that sinks to the bottom of the cup. However, families did not let children to drink a lot of coffee. The coffee in my family home in Istanbul is mostly prepared as Turkish and filter coffee, moreover in the recent years after I started working with coffee, my family came to prefer French press most. My father and my uncle's wife (she was born in Germany) were bringing ground filter coffee from Germany and we were brewing it at my dad's office, as well. But to be honest with you, for a very long period of time, including my university years, I drank lots of instant coffee. Although I had the opportunity to taste premium coffees, I did not have enough knowledge to differentiate between the instant and premium coffee. I woke up when I met with spe- cialty coffee in 2006. SA: What was your first incredible experience with coffee? AY: It was in 2000 when I went to Venice, Italy, for holiday with my family. We organized a tour with a tourism agency and the tour guide had been living in Italy for many years, so he knew the best cafés in the town. One day, he split me from the main group with some other young people and took us to an espresso bar on a very small street of Venice—I don't remember the name anymore. I had my first espresso in my life and I really said, "Wow!" I remember it very clearly. SA: Tell me about your schooling and how you got into coffee. AY: I completed my faculty with an M.B.A. degree in marketing. While I was studying, I was working with my father at our family business in the production of woodworking machineries. In my last year of the M.B.A. program, I had to decide on the subject for my dissertation and I wanted to focus on something I really liked. Either it would be about business, which I worked in as a part-time www.baristamagazine.com 57