Barista Champions at Let’s Talk Coffee Mexico 2016

An All-Star Team of Mexican Barista Champions will be at Let’s Talk Coffee Mexico 2016 Next Week

The popular coffee event, Let’s Talk Coffee  (LTC), presented by importer Sustainable Harvest, returns for another installment  (its thirteenth!) next week in Puerto Vallarta. The idea behind LTC is to bring together multiple facets of the coffee chain for in-depth education about coffee production, challenges in the marketplace, improving quality, and strengthening bonds between producers, roasters, and retailers.

In the past, the event has landed in such locations as Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, and most recently in Panama.

With the LTC in 2009 in Nicaragua, Sustainable Harvest has made a concerted effort to bring more baristas to the event. The following year in Peru, in fact, Sustainable Harvest hosted a team of international barista champions for a week before LTC where they lived and experienced life firsthand on a coffee farm while also enjoying a number of challenges, team work, and camaraderie, which cumulated in the baristas setting up a coffee stand in the nearby town for the market day and preparing  coffee for the locals.

œLet’s Talk Coffee is about annually coming together to honor the connected and transparent supply chain that is Relationship Coffee,” says David Griswold, founder and CEO of Sustainable Harvest. “It’s an entire ecosystem that brings us these coffees ”not only the barista and producer, but so many actors in between.The baristas at Let’s Talk Coffee use their artistry to craft amazing beverages and share them with everyone who made these coffees possible.   

Next week’s LTC will feature a truly stellar lineup of Mexican barista champions including:

Fabrizio Sención Ramírez, multi-time Mexican barista champion and runner-up at the 2012 World Barista Championship in Vienna, Austria and now own Café Sublimé and Estelar Café in Guadalajara. He’ll be behind the bar during coffee breaks at Let’s Talk Coffee, and deliver a talk on the main stage about Mexico’s emerging third-wave culture and how Mexican roasters and producers have innovated to develop diverse cup profiles from Mexico’s varied growing regions.

–  Julieta Vazquez Rivera, who was the 2015  Barista Champion of Mexico and competed at the WBC in Dublin, Ireland this past June. Julieta will take part in Tracy Ging’s The Coffeewoman  session, which will bring together women leaders throughout the supply chain to discuss specific perceptions and challenges they face, as well as methods of creating and sharing value in the supply chain.

– Among the other baristas, LTC will have will be  Jorge Sotomayor, who owns Café Sublimé with Fabrizio, and  Mickey Comerford, Colectivo Coffee‘s head trainer. Jorge will do coffee service with Fabrizio, while Mickey will lead a session at Let’s Talk Coffee called Let’s Talk Barista Tips and Training.

David Griswold adds, “For me, having champion baristas at Let’s Talk Coffee creates one of the most powerful moments in specialty coffee. When I watch baristas interact with producers and others who are behind the coffee they are serving, I can immediately sense the beginning of a deeper, more connected relationship in coffee. 

Let’s Talk Coffee Mexico 2016 will run from October 13-16.