Zachary and Jordan

For the past couple of years, March 29, 2019 has been known by some in the UK as “Brexit Day,” the historic moment when the country would unmoor itself from the tiresome burden of Europe and float off into a glorious, sun-dappled, immigration-free future. This uncertainty has real-world consequences, one of which is the lack of skilled workers willing to risk moving to the UK when a no-deal, hard-border exit is still a genuine possibility. And the disparity between foreign-born and home grown workers is significant; Andrea Wareham, an HR manager at Pret a Manger, estimates that “just one in 50 applicants for jobs at the chain are British. ” This is amid a bit of a boom in British coffee culture, where the UK coffee shop market grew 7.9% in the previous year, bringing the total value of the industry to £10.1 billion ($13.27 billion).

Watching Du Jianing’s winning Finals routine on Sunday, one couldn’t help but feel like you were sitting around her kitchen table or at a practice run in her home shop Uni-Uni Roasters and Bakery in Nanjing (part of former Chinese Barista Champion Jeremy Zhang This was not due to any sort of time constraint; anyone who saw Jianing’s routine knows that she could have calmly fit 15 minutes worth of performance into the tight 10-minute window the Brewers Cup provides. Counter Culture’s Kathy Altamirano, a sensory judge during Jianing’s Finals performance, explains the high-stakes game the Chines Brewers Cup Champion was playing: It was about the coffee at that very moment, how it tasted on stage at the Finals of the World Brewers Cup Championship in Boston, Massachusetts, thousands of miles away from where it was grown and even further from Jianing’s home in Nanjing.

Whereas Re:Co—an event put on by the Specialty Coffee Association that has often been likened to the Ted Talks of coffee—usually focuses on a variety of subjects relevant to thought leaders in specialty coffee, this year’s event homed in on just one subject: coffee’s C market price crisis. The goal of this year’s content was to move ideas toward action; everyone was asked during Re:Co founder Peter Giuliano’s opening remarks to think about their Re:Co pledge, and for the first time, Re:Co attendees were split into interactive group sessions to find and commit to those pledges. While production is a necessary and fascinating focus of much of Re:Co’s content, I found talks on the consumer side incredibly engaging, featuring stars like Michelle Johnson of The Chocolate Barista, Phyllis Johnson of BD Imports, and Red Bay Coffee founder Keba Konte. Michelle Johnson’s session was the talk of Re:Co Boston, showing her range as a speaker and on one of coffee’s biggest stages.

TBCH that’s roughly half of what we could have listed here for accomplishments related to Umeko Motoyoshi, who exemplifies the spirit and intentionality of the Sprudge Twenty through their multi-faceted work across the specialty coffee industry. I’d worked in coffee for about six years before I experienced a coffee that really amazed me— That coffee, the first coffee I ever felt dazzled by, was roasted and brewed by Four Barrel Coffee, and I’d just started work there as a barista. Also, I’m assuming I’d be in a space station where the internal atmospheric pressure is regulated so I could boil water at a high enough temperature to brew coffee.