Sleepy in Seattle

For those of you who haven’t visited Seattle it probably conjure up memories of a slushy movie with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Microsoft, Boeing’s home town or the birth place of modern coffee culture aka Starbucks.

I have had the pleasure of visiting Seattle a couple of times before in a research capacity but this time was different – I was there with BTB founder, Jem Rogers, to launch Sweetbird to an eagerly awaiting North American market at the Coffee Fest show. Our hosts for the visit were the newly formed Beyond the Bean US from down in the south which led to some culinary conversations about the merits of fried chicken and our syrups and smoothies.

The show itself was packed full of non-coffee stuff with a little coffee – seems to be the trend these days! Our Sweetbird booth was located directly opposite La Marzocca, so were well caffeinated with great coffee from Ritual in San Francisco and Stumptown in Portland to name but two – hey, even we need a break from smoothies occasionally!

Other show highlights included the new infamous Millrock latte art competition worth a highly credible $2,500 to the winner, which this year went to Andrew Milstead of the Urban coffee lounge in Kirkland. The Northwest regional heats of the USBC took place on the Saturday and Sunday and the poster boy of the US coffee scene Billy Wilson (one of the star’s of our latte art DVD) triumphed again. Heather Perry recent cover girl of Barista magazine did an excellent job of compere and Nick Cho of the WBC board and Washington DC coffee evangelist was head judge.

With the show on all three days of our visit time was limited to explore and reacquaint ourselves with the city. On a couple of mornings James Fisher of Clifton Coffee accompanied me for breakfast in the infamous Pike Place Market - we had a slap up meal of the works washed down with some filter brew with stunning views of the bay. On Friday Josh Dick of Urnex swung by the new 15th avenue coffee & tea site (Starbucks new concept) with us where Jacob the manager was a great host. Long gone are the days when Starbucks chased you from their stores if you took any photographs – we were actually encouraged to do so. They had single origin Kenya AA on one of the grinders and I had a memorable double macchiato. Later the staff dropped by our booth at the show and took a bottle of Sweetbird English Toffee back for evaluation!

The out of show social merry go round was in full swing on Saturday night with Victrola hosting a barista smackdown between Seattle and LA by live video link. Free beer, loads of coffee people (many inked up!) in a great roastery environment contributed to a great evening. The smackdown was won by LA convincingly so perhaps the crew there are looking to relocate the title of coffee city.

Other points of note from the weekend were – Starbucks celebrating the anniversary of Clover –mmm – it's been around a bit longer than that, Meeting Robert Goble of Coffeed for the first time, watching Stephen Hurst of Mercanta down three of our mango & orange ready to drink smoothies in 5 minutes flat, the cleanliness of the streets, bumping in to some of the Chicago Bears team in the elevator and most importantly the mega reception that Sweetbird got in Seattle!!!