LTC TALKS

Thanks to all who joined us at Let’s Talk Coffee 2018 Colombia! We’re grateful for your contributions to the event dialogue and thank you for investing your time and energy into the Let’s Talk Coffee movement to create a better future for coffee. We’re happy to make the live streamed presentations from the event available to you below. Be sure to also check out photos on our Facebook page.

When Kim Ossenblock left a large roasting company after six years to start his own business, he knew he would have to draw on social media to distinguish himself from the crowd. Employing YouTube as his primary tool, he has done just that with his business Barista Kim. In this clip, Kim talks about keys to developing captivating content and demonstrates how easy creating a video can be by making one on the spot.

Everyone involved in the coffee supply chain knows that producers, roasters, and other stakeholders operate at the whim of an extremely volatile C market that creates challenges with every sharp rise and steep fall.

The “cold brew” method of making coffee is one of the simplest. To make a batch, the user steeps coarsely ground coffee in cold or room temperature for several hours—usually around 12. The grounds are filtered out when the brewing process is complete, and the result is a strong brew that is typically diluted with water and/or milk.

Rick Peyser spent 27 years at Keurig Green Mountain. While he held many positions during that time, he’s undoubtedly best known in the specialty coffee world for the last title he had there: Director of Social Advocacy and Supply Chain Community Outreach. While holding that job, Rick was a true farmer advocate, working in coffee-producing communities to develop effective solutions for strengthening coffee supply chains.

One of the guiding principles of Let’s Talk Coffee® is collaboration: Each year, the entire supply chain comes together to forge relationships and share ideas. And so it’s fitting that one of the highlights of Let’s Talk Coffee® Panama illustrates how much can be achieved when each link in the supply chain comes together for a common cause.

Robusta has often been shunned in specialty coffee, assumed to have poor quality and to be unworthy of inclusion in the quality conversation. But there has been a recent quality renaissance around Robusta, with quality-minded growers in countries like Brazil, India, and Uganda tending to the crops the same way they would Arabica crops, and in turn producing some exciting coffees in the emerging category of Specialty Robusta.

One of the highlights of Let’s Talk Relationship Coffee was the “Women in Coffee” panel moderated by Sustainable Harvest’s Olga Cuellar Gomez. Women play an invaluable role in all links of the specialty coffee supply chain, and the changing dynamics of gender is an increasingly pressing topic in the industry.

Australia’s cafe culture is world-renowned, and its coffee drinkers favor espresso-based beverages such as the Flat White (a cousin of the cappuccino that originates in the area). As such, milk plays an essential role in the country’s specialty coffee shops. Let’s Talk Relationship Coffee tapped into the subject with a session titled “Let’s Talk Milk,” moderated by Sarah Baker of BeanScene and bringing together several Australian milk experts.