WBCs and Zacharys Prove It's a Small World (But We Wouldn't Want to Paint It)

Apologies to Stephen Wright for stealing his joke for our headline, but hey, it works.

While we hope we've been good members of the Pittsburgh/MidAtlantic/US barista community (SCAA, BGA, competitions, CoffeeKids, Direct Trade, promotion of good local shops, etc.), until now, we admittedly haven't paid all that much attention to barista communities from other hemispheres.  While we've been represented at the past two USBCs, we've yet to attend a World Barista Championship.

After last week's WBC, we're now paying attention.  While Rich and a bunch of folks were arguing with Nick and a bunch of folks about the SCAA's handling of consumer marketing to promote the value and goodness of quality arabica coffees, a couple of kids went off in a different direction, soliciting donations so they could get to Tokyo and show what could be done with videoblogging.

The result was a giant snowball of global love that continues to pick up steam.

ZacharyZachary, comprised of Zachary Carlsen from NYC and current MidAtlantic Barista Champion Katie Carguilo of murky coffee, videotaped everything that moved in Tokyo.  The first amazing thing they did - at least from the standpoint of output and stamina - was capturing presentations of all 45 national barista champions, with editing and voiceover commentary and getting those videos live on the same day.   Again, with just two people.  From a foreign country.

The second amazing thing was the response to it all.  For the first time families and friends of competitors from 45 countries across six contintents could follow the proceedings in near real-time.  The comments following each performance told their own stories of pride, concern and emotions from giddiness to tears.

Rich, who despite his experience as a social networking evangelist, was not a believer in the Zachary's ambitious videoblogging plan at first, immediately "got it" when confronted with the global reaction after the first videos were released and threw in some beer money to the cause.  We imagine there were hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had the same epiphany.  Even now light bulbs continue to go off as more are exposed to ZacharyZachary's coverage.

In the space of about 48 hours, despite never having videoblogged a prior barista competition, it became impossible to conceive of a future competition at any level without videoblogging.

And it goes beyond just the surface stuff.  As we've got connections in the Balkans, we were interested in Nik Orosi's performance and linked to the video of his presentation. Although we've never met nor spoken with Nik, he found our link by Googling and sent us a heartfelt email last night as a result of that link. 

From his email, we learned that Nik was not sponsored - he paid his own way - and that he performed and recorded his own music with a friend and even handpainted his own cups.  You have to respect that commitment.  So now we've got a new friend in Croatia to visit.

And as we know many folks in Pittsburgh have ties to the Balkans, the next time you're over there, please visit Eli's Caffe in Zagreb and say hi to Nik for us.

There's so much love going around that if it weren't for all the technology, one might even think we'd gone back to the 60s!

Comments

[Larry]

I agree, watching the performances was amazing. Thank you for turning we, "your continuing-to-be-educated-about-coffee- culture customers" into educated consumers. Hope that the video blogging will happen next year at the mid-atlantics.