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Susie—then Newman, not yet Spindler—rolled along. A passionate coffee consumer since her late teens, Susie managed several segments for the CDG, among them the college coffeehouse program. She worked with a couple guys who would go on to be pretty important in coffee, Ted Lingle and Stu Adelson, and she remembers having her first eye-opening cup of coffee with Stu "at a cute little place called Periwinkles which was way ahead of its time." She left coffee for a while though and moved to West Yellowstone, Mont., from Chicago. She co-owned an advertising agency based in Salt Lake City, and then helped develop a center outside of Yellowstone National Park called the Grizzly Discovery Center. While managing the Centers marketing, and the not-for-profit international grizzly fund, she "became enmeshed in the world of endangered species and grizzly bears," Susie says. "Believe me, having the head of a mostly awake but sedated 1,300-pound Kodiak bear in one's lap is an experience not easily forgotten—ever." She didn't stay away from coffee for long, however. Soon enough the ICO was knocking on her door again, this time asking that she manage North American marketing for the newly created Gourmet Project, which the ICO funded along with Common Fund for Commodities and the ITC/WTO to work with coffee farmers in five producing countries to improve their crops in an effort to fetch higher prices. Among the quality consultants hired for the Brazil specific portion of the Gourmet Project was George Howell, who had recently sold his Boston-based café chain, the Coffee Connection, to Starbucks. As part of the marketplace education, the group of consultants, marketing experts, Susie, and George came up with the idea for a contest. It was called the Best of Brazil, and with the internet auction platform that Susie and Don Holly—also one of this industry's great luminaries—helped plan and create, the contest winners were able to sell their coffee to the highest bidder, for the first time ever. Two years later, Guatemala wanted in, and that's when Susie came up with the name Cup of Excellence (COE). "Its original goal was simple: find great coffees and pay farmers more money for these coffees," says Susie. "The execution of this goal was not that simple since transparency, chain of custody, lot separation, cupping skills, perfect sample preparation, program funding, and the most elusive of all, extra premiums from roasters, did not just appear out of nowhere." Under Susie's leadership, however, roasters came around, and in a big way. In the 2000s, COE was attracting head roasters and cuppers from the most reputable coffee companies on the planet to serve on international juries for competitions throughout South and Central America. As one of the original five countries in the Gourmet Project, Burundi was the second African country after Rwanda in the COE program, though Africa continues to present unique challenges that make the success of producing competitions that meet the COE standards difficult. Among the first roasters wanting in on COE coffees was Duane Sorenson, owner of the still-young Portland, Ore.–based company Stumptown Coffee Roasters. This was before there were many green-coffee buyers at small specialty-roasting companies; serving as a judge on a COE jury was one of the very few opportunities for roasters to visit producing countries to learn about production. Susie is quick to point out that Duane was one of a handful of important early adopters, "Geoff Watts, Peter Giuliano, Erna Knutsen, Tom Owen, Ken Davids, Danny O'Neill, Oren Bloostein, Becky McKinnon, Lindsay Bolger, just to name a few." Fairly soon into taking over management of her family's coffee farms in El Salvador from her father, Aida Batlle entered this still-new coffee competition, and, to her surprise, won first place. That was in 2003. Aida was then and is now still among the most 84 barista magazine B o o k 4 7 - 9 2 . i n d d 8 4 Book 47-92.indd 84 5 / 1 5 / 1 4 1 0 : 4 7 P M 5/15/14 10:47 PM