Today, I’m headed up to the Skamania Lodge in Washington for the Roasters Guild Retreat, which begins tonight and goes through Sunday.
I went to the Roasters Retreat back in 2002, when I was the editor of some other coffee magazine, and it was a lot of fun. It’ll be interesting to go back, especially since I increasingly consider Barista Magazine to be a magazine for coffee professionals in a general sense. Our readers are coffee brainiacs, pretty much across the board. And while most identify themselves as cafe retailers and professional baristas, a good number of them roast, or are planning to roast in their future.
But besides covering an event that is an intimate educational experience for the October/November issue of Barista Magazine, and besides it being held virtually in my backyard (just an hour up the road from Portland), I have another reason for attending: the Barista Guild of America is actively working on a Barista Camp to be held in the second half of 2010, and we at Barista Magazine are committed to doing everything we can to support them and help make this thing happen. At the Roasters Retreat, I’ll be bunking with my dear pal and frequent coffee-travel roomie, Phuong Tran, a member of the BGA Executive Coucil, who is attending the event as a research trip for her work planning the Barista Camp.
I’m hoping to do some blog posts from Skamania, so stay tuned!
