#scaa2014

where's @roni_can_go ? all these baristas and I'm missing a writer. #rivers #bga #scaa2014 #turnsoutwereathing

Today's schedule of events, I took 2 classes. Both of these were really solid. There was a comparative cupping class which I'm teaching next month so I wanted to take that just to have a better sense going into it of how that class works. Then there was a brewing technologies class which I taught a couple months ago and having done that I wanted to see how the class is really taught. That sounds kind of bad, but as background I was teaching that in China and some things just need to be done differently there, but I think that I can teach that better now if I'm ever asked to do that again. Saw some typos in the materials in both classes which I've been told I can just go into the files and fix. Because I'm an advisor on one of the committees that deals with this stuff I have access to all of the materials for all of the classes and can do that, but I generally prefer to take the issues to people who are more involved with whichever class it is so things aren't unexpectedly changing under them, especially if it's something that's not only in the roasting track. Then there was the Roasters Guild meeting, which had some good information. I learned that money raised at the silent auction at retreat made up a pretty big chunk of the money Coffee Kids brought in last year. (and the fund raising event that my shop does for them every year is also apparently not too shabby in the big picture.) Had some good conversations before/during/after that meeting. And of course there's a natural tie in with the work that I do on the software side in that there were a couple kegs with what open source people would call "free as in beer". The analogy works especially well with my software because to get the free beer you needed to get yourself to Seattle for this event and go to this meeting and to get much use out of my software you need to buy some hardware for it to talk to (like a coffee roaster and some data acquisition hardware, so the software is free (I'm always glad to take money for that if you want to send any, but it isn't mandatory and most people don't) but you've probably spent thousands or tens of thousands (or more) of dollars to be able to get any use out of it).