This year's San Francisco CoffeeCon was a resounding success with a packed house. George Howell continues to be the greatest single contributor, highlighting a lecture on coffee so well crafted that it could be a college credit course just for attending. Seriously, you could take a complete stranger off the street who knows nothing about coffee beyond Yuban, and have them walk out of there knowing as much about coffee, it's history, processing etc as the rest of us. And he does it all in such an easy to follow fashion. Combined with a tasting of coffees, it was a great presentation.

Many other presentations kept the event humming. Jim, Chris, Henry and I were quite busy with our contributions to the event, so I didn't get to attend all the lectures. But based on the energy of the crowd and the excitement and good time apparently had by all, something like this would be a great thing to have more frequently.

Our own Jim Schulman pulled double duty, leading two presentations, one on water quality and another (which was more like two presentations/lessons in one) on dialing in espresso at home and finding what balance actually means, using very well dialed in example shots pulled by Dustin Demers and samples of flavor extremes (bitter, sour, sweet) for the crowd to sample prior.

Henry and Chris braved the sun and the freeway sounds outside doing their roasting presentation alongside the food trucks and big curious crowds. Yours truly was indoors with the laptop and Quest for a shorter period of time between George's lecture and Jim's, which I also was helping out with. My first two people who happened to stop and talk to me about roasting were non other than Alan Adler and Ken Davids! No nerves there.

There were tons of vendors in a very large main gallery upstairs with tons of great coffee, goodies to eat and cool gear. All in all, it was a great event and I hope it happens again in San Francisco next year!

I had a lot of fun roasting on the patio, but I sure was glad that I brought a hat because it seemed unseasonably warm in San Francisco on Saturday; it felt like I was still in San Jose.

I really enjoyed George Howell's talk as well, I took about 20 minutes to do a quick pass on the show floor and try come coffees, Mr. Espresso's Neapolitan Blend, a cold brew Ethiopia from the Bruer booth that changed my mind about cold brew coffee, some of George Howell's coffee and some coffee from Chromatic. I wish I had taken more time to see the show floor and visit the booths, and take in some of the lectures, maybe the Turkish Coffee class, but I really enjoyed talking with the attendees about roasting who ranged in experience from folks who'd never roasted but were considering it as a next step to someone involved in a three bag institutional roasting program for the California Department of Corrections (who also had three home roasters at home).

As Rasqual predicted before from previous CoffeeCon events in Chicago, the roasting demos with the hot air popcorn popper were very popular. I guess that it comes across as an easy way to get into roasting and I bet that Thompson Owen's posts about using his popper when he's home from Sweet Maria's and finds that he runs out of coffee doesn't hurt. Most folks had heard of Sweet Maria's. I did get several people come up to me to talk about the Behmor, either because they had one or knew someone who has one. We had a bit of a struggle finding good power for the Behmor, and after we set up found out that Joe Behm had been moved out to the patio with us for his demos of the Behmor Plus so we had to find outlets with separate circuits, but we managed to get it done, the CoffeeCon staff was very helpful. I was glad, though, that I brought my Variac so that I could fine tune the voltage to what I'm used to and use it to control the popper (which I hadn't used in years, it did pretty well). Here's a couple pictures of the roasting setup outside. You can see Henry at his Mini 500 and you can also see the Behmor Plus in the background of one of the photos. More pictures can be found at a site called RebelMouse: https://www.rebelmouse.com/CoffeeCon/64 ... elMouse_tw

Yakster/Chris- look we are in sprudge today (see item 4) http://sprudge.com/coffeecon-san-francisco.html

Also thanks again for your roasting demonstration. It was incredibly helpful to have someone experienced talk me though the ins and outs of driving a Behmor, and to gain a better conceptual understanding of how to control what is happening during the roast (and the role voltage plays). My roasts are significantly better now as a result.

I saw that, I'm glad they got a picture of the outdoor roasting area. I really enjoyed meeting and talking to roasters and those interested in roasting at CoffeeCon. Glad I could help.

can you identify who is in the coffeecon roasting picture in sprudge.

Well, It's me and Neil (elusiven) on the left talking about the Behmor and Henry (Chang00) is speaking to three folks I don't know about the Mini-500 and roasting in general, I'd imagine.