Long Beach, California 2007 SCAA Convention

The show was first week in May, and I called in March 2007!! She laughed at me and said everything was sold out.  If something came up she would call me. Last week in March I got a call saying they had a booth available did I want it. I said yes and here we go. I had less than a month to come up with a logo, a banner, buy and Espresso machine, make business cards, brochures, coffee cup etc. At that point, Sergio was just starting the harvest and we did not know if we had any coffee good enough to be consider special in any way.  Two weeks before the show, he called me and said the coffee got an 88 cupping, perfect! I got on the plane to California with a 30 lb excess weight luggage.  I wanted to carry everything with me. I was afraid the luggage would get lost.   The day of the set up came, we went to the convention center, unpack the Espresso machine and just looked at each other.....We had no idea how to set up the machine, much less how to make an espresso. The booth turned out beautiful and very elegant ( Sergio's touch!!!) but we could not make the coffee.  Thanks again to  the universe, the manufactures of Rancilio Coffee Machines were at the show and we had an "Espresso for Idiots" quick  lesson which worked for those few days.( I have taken a real Barista class after that) Pretty soon we were distributing coffee to people and they all loved our coffee. It was great to know that the small roaster were so happy to be talking to the farm itself, rather than going thru major distributors. We made  lots of contacts. One of the big roasters approached us and asked if they could visit the farm in July. We said of course and that Sergio was going to put together a whole trip to include several coffee regions in Brazil.  I was totally excited with the outcome and the trip. It would be a way for me to learn everything about growing coffee!!I Came back to New York sure that this is what I wanted to do. Get into a whole new area. There  was so much for me to learn. I bought several books and dvd so that at least I knew what questions to ask about coffee !!! This was my first step into the coffee world!!