Our favorite week of the year has come and gone, and all we’re left with is sweet, sweet memories and caffeine withdrawal after consuming 20 cups a day for three days straight. The Specialty Coffee Expo, or SCA for short, was held in Seattle again this year and the entire Fellow squad made the trip. Our highlights outside of the convention hall include a team banana relay race around a high school track, an insane dinner spread cooked by our friends from Fellow Taiwan, and hula hoops mixed with inflatable unicorns at the La Marzocco party.
Our highlights inside the convention hall could be a never-ending list, but we managed to narrow it down to our three favorites!
Playground Pop-Up Booth
This year’s booth was easily Fellow’s biggest, best, and most colorful one to date. Since you can only visit the Playground when you’re in the Bay Area, we decided to replicate the fun and bring a pop-up Playground to Seattle. We made a life-sized version of our Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel mural and built brew tables in the same style as those in our store. But instead of having you BYOC (brew your own coffee), we brought in some of the country’s best roasters to brew at our coffee bar. Verve Coffee Roasters, AKA Coffee, Peixoto Coffee Roasters, Onyx Coffee Lab, Slate Coffee Roasters, Prevail Coffee Roasters, Coava Coffee Roasters, and Port of Mokha all brewed up some serious liquid gold and provided our team with endless entertainment.
Ready for a major flashback? Check out our booth from our first SCA four years ago when we only had Duo and Joey to show!
We Won A Few Ribbons
Every year, the Specialty Coffee Association holds a Best New Product competition. We entered our two latest gadgets and walked away with two ribbons. Prismo was named Runner-Up in the Consumer Equipment Non-Electrical category and Stagg EKG/EKG+ was named Runner-Up in the Consumer Equipment Electrical category.
US Brewers Cup Competitors
While our official SCA job was to man the Fellow booth, our unofficial job was to sneak off to catch the action on the competition floor. If you’ve never seen a brewers or barista competition, it’s really something else. You can watch the recorded live stream of the 2018 US Coffee Championships here.
We were honored and excited seven competitors in the US Brewers Cup Championship brewed with Fellow gear. These people are some of the hardest working and most driven folks in the industry, and we feel very lucky they let us be part of their journey in this teeny tiny way. Any Prismo fans out there? For the first time in US Coffee Championships history, Prismo was used in competition! Check out the competitors in action:
Dylan Siemens of Onyx Coffee Lab competing with Stagg EKG.
Emmeline Wang of Equator Coffees & Teas competing with Stagg EKG.
Kelly Hill of Temple Coffee Roasters competing with Stagg [X] Dripper and Stagg EKG.
Wade Preston of Prevail Coffee Roasters competing with Prismo and Stagg EKG.
Elika Liftee of Onyx Coffee Lab competing with Stagg EKG.
Blair Smith of Augie’s Coffee competing with Stagg [X] Dripper and Stagg EKG.
Nick Stevens of West Oak Coffee Bar competing with Stagg EKG.
That’s a wrap on SCA 2018. See you next year in Boston!