Barista Magazine is your home for the worldwide community of coffee and the people who make it.
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/84829
LOS ANGELES, CA Leave it to the Californias—on a break during Barista Nation on September 15—to play pick-up basketball when it's 110 degrees out. Below: A endees were smi en with the off erings from local food trucks. Champion) Heather Perry and Michael Phillips, was one of the most popular sessions of the day. (This is part of the paradox—and potential—of specialty coffee in Southern California: The place is packed with coffee all-stars.) A factor that is both consistently at play and constantly discussed in Southern California is of course the weather. While L.A. is known for its year-round mostly sunny and temperate days, Mother Nature decided to throw out a curveball. Via a heat wave, she reminded us that while the region is unquestionably beautiful and coastal, it is also a desert. Temperatures in the Los Angeles area soared throughout the day Barista Nation took place, hit triple digits and just kept on climbing. Nevertheless, Barista Nation plowed forward. There were even impromptu basketball games in the full sun during brief breaks in the event program because, as we all know, baristas are in their heart of hearts, ballers. The theme for the event, reflecting the name of the host, was "Coffee and Beyond," 48 barista magazine so the educational and interactive sessions encouraged attendees to look over the horizon and anticipate the future. Peter took a different route in his keynote, asking the attendees to focus on the present. He called his speech, "Barista First and Always." He asked attendees to ponder one of the most basic questions— namely, what is a barista? Peter's answer came in two parts. A barista, he said, is someone who makes coffee, and someone who makes human connections. He talked about a trip he took to Ethiopia, the birthplace, he pointed out, of both coffee and humanity. There, he said, he had the opportunity to meet some locals and participate in their coffee ritual. "That woman," he said, pointing to a slide of an Ethiopian woman roasting coffee beans over an open fire, "is conducting a ceremony that is thousands of years old, and though she may have neither seen nor even know what an espresso machine is, she is a barista. She creates and shares coffee with other people, and those people are brought together because of the ritual she performed."