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PU LL: EV EN T S PHOTO BY ERSHAD MALAKOOTI COFFEE CULTURE GROWING FAST IN TEHRAN IT'S HARD TO UNDERSTAND the passion and enthusiasm behind a coffee community until you're right there in the middle of the action. The coffee community in Tehran, Iran, has been persistently grinding away at local government and heads of industry for the last three years to get permission to host a national barista competition, and this October, due to the energy, passion and drive of Mohammad Khani and the Iranian Barista Guild (IBG), the IBG Barista Championship was finally hosted at the Coffee and Cocoa International Festival. Earlier this year I was invited to come to Iran as an International Coffee Mentor to host three one-day barista training workshops at the Coffee and Cocoa International Festival. This sounded like a great opportunityÑbut I was unsure. Is there a coffee and barista culture in Iran to begin with? It was intended that I would deliver a keynote speech at the opening ceremony for the festival, host three one-day workshops, and be the head judge at the national IBG barista competitions that were to be hosted on the Saturday of the event, October 19. I was a little skeptical early on, so I did some research on the barista community in Tehran before my trip. This led to a flurry of encouraging emails, Facebook messages, and tweets. The world seems so small when Seattle barista Laila GhambariÑwhose appearance on the cover of Barista Magazine in April of 2012 inspired Mohammad and his friends to establish the GuildÑis 28 barista magazine connecting you with people in Iran. It's amazing to be sitting in the middle in Ireland putting all the pieces together. I even received messages of support from a coffee friend in Russia, Sergiy Reminy, encouraging me to go. The energy, encouragement, enthusiasm, and willingness to get me to Iran to be part of the festival, to run both the workshops and the national competitions, was phenomenal. Through e-mails I was introduced to Mohammad and also Safa Salehi of Coffee Press in Iran. These two gentlemen are the main collaborators behind the barista movement in Tehran, and organized the national championship. They also were immensely helpful in putting together my three one-day workshop details. More than 60 baristas and cafŽ owners attended the workshops. These training days were versions of the Barista Level 1 and Barista Level 2 training that we host in our own barista academy back in Ireland. We also ran a cafŽ owners' workshop on the third day. I brought all of the course notes, workbooks, theory papers, videos, and exam papers for each class and had them translated on site. The classes were intense and packed with enthusiastic and educated baristas. The level of energy and passion to share coffee knowledge was such that we ran over time every day, making sure every question was answered in detail and in both English and Farsi. We covered coffee history, cupping, processing, cultivation, roasting, sensory evaluations, technical skills, writing a coffee menu, financing, marketing strategy, and business positioning. Students traveled from all over Iran, some more than three