This week, Steve & Col kick back on their respective couches at home as they work their way through recent Big Grill shenanigans, big travel plans, the African Fine Coffees Association’s Taste of Harvest program, and the start of a conversation about a recent trend in the conflagration of solubility with quality.

Also covered: sore thighs, paella pans, exciting plant stock producing tasty coffee in Malawi, building direct trade relationships in Africa, and the moral question involved when you buy coffee from countries with problematic government.

Check out photos from Colin’s bike ride and the Big Grill shenanigans by visiting his instagram account.

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This podcast has been kindly brought to you by Nuova Simonelli. 

CoLab: Prague saw the return of the extended Q&A session to the

This week’s video is the morning panel from CoLab: Prague with Chahan

This week, Steve and Colin return to an old,

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This podcast has been brought to you with the support of Nuova Simonelli. 

We’re willing to admit here at TTHQ that we knew CoLab:

Tibor’s talk is refreshingly candid and insanely useful to

This week, we step away from the hustle and bustle of all the fun happening with the specialty coffee community on the interwebs, turning our attention to something we should all focus on a bit more: understanding what happens at origin. With the help of good friend Alejandro Martinez of Finca Argentina in El Salvador, we take a look at what happens on the farm seasonally, what changes you might see on a farm that sells “specialty” vs. “commodity”, and how things are changing. Also covered: the ideal relationship between a farmer and a buyer, the impact of leaf rust on El Salvador, and biodynamic gnomes (or why you maybe shouldn’t stay at Ale’s house alone).

Our second speaker at the Barista Guild of Europe’s CoLab event is a familiar face to those on the competition circuit: Erna Tosberg, a barista and trainer working for roestbar Munster, represented Germany at the 2014 WBC. A passionate advocate for coffee education, she was also involved in the first-ever Barista Camp (Athens, 2014) as an AST and is responsible for Kaffeschule Munster, a coffee school associated with roestbar: “because the more people know about coffee as a product, the more they will appreciate high-quality coffee.”

In her talk, Erna poses a question that frequently crops up in our community: do we need barista competitions? Walking the audience through her perspective both as a competitor and as a trainer, Erna thoughtfully explores the positives and negatives of our current competition platform and lands on a very firm answer.

You can keep up with all of Erna’s work with roestbar here and her work with kaffeschule munster here.

Earlier this week, we spoke with Ellie Hudson (SCAA) about

This week, we’re joined by the primary ambassador of SCAA’s educational program and a powerhouse of initiative, knowledge, community-building, and just plain getting stuff done: SCAA’s Director of Professional Development, Ellie Hudson. Covering everything from the alignment of SCAA & SCAE in the coming months to the future of the US Regional Competition program, Episode the 32nd offers a unique look at the other side of some of the stories we’ve been discussing the past few weeks. Also included in this week’s episode: Fritz Storm-isms, Doug Zell’s tenacity, the origin of the Gentle Giant joke, and the U.S.S. Badger.

You won’t want to miss this! Ellie has been on our podcast guest wishlist since the beginning of this year; we were so excited, this week’s recording scheduled twelve weeks in advance. For more information about the SCAA research that Ellie references in the podcast, click here.

Our first speaker at Barista Guild of Europe’s CoLab event could very

Chahan’s talk to the attendees of CoLab: Prague is a rollicking journey

You can keep up with all of the exciting work that Chahan is doing as