Interconnectedness

I think it was artist Jenny Holzer who said it best in her truism series: "Everything is delicately interconnected".
In coffee, that thought slaps me upside the head everyday...maybe not indelicately...but it is certainly not subtle.

I am late for bed. I need to wake up at 3 am to catch a plane to Roasters Guild Retreat which is going down this weekend at Sugar Lake Lodge in Grand Rapids, MN. There, I will meet roasters from all over the world. It's a condensed and slightly more specialized version of the annual SCAA conference. At this thing, coffee is the purpose. Sure, there are a bunch of roasting machines there to mess with, but still, the coffee is why we show up.
And the connection.
We are assigned to a team of roasters and asked to craft the best coffee possible. We give our team a goofy name and set to work..arguing and grandstanding, slurping and sampling again, grading and blending. After all of that, you can't help but feel a connection to eachother and the coffee.

A couple of years ago I met a woman in Nicaragua at a cupping table. She was heading out to Rimini, Italy the next day. At that conference she met two of my good friends - one from Seattle and one from Oslo.
Last week I met a group of amazing women at a seminar in Costa Rica. I get to see at least two of them again in Grand Rapids this weekend. A dude in Costa Rica gave me Peter G's cupping spoons that he left behind in New York at the Q exams... I'll give them to Peter when I see him at the retreat.

Not sure where I am going with this, but maybe I'm just thinking about how global and specific this coffee thing is...all at the same time. It's intimate and huge. And it's just so cool.