reco

Beginning next week, a portion of the coffee world will shift its attention to the city of Gothenburg. That’s where the 2015 World of Coffee event is taking place, an annual trade show put on by the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe. There’s also a very special new event happening this year in Sweden: Re:co.

That would be the SCAA Symposium, newly rebranded as Re:co, which stands for “regarding coffee.” This year’s Re:co launch is a culmination of the event breaking out from its North American moorings, an answer to Europe’s own lack of a similarly styled event, and a new alliance between the Symposium and World Coffee Events, the international coffee organization that presents the World Barista Championship and other coffee competitions.

Presenters for the inaugural Re:co event are grouped into three different concepts: “Where Are We Now?” “Where Can We Go?” and “How Can We Get There?” Here’s a complete list of speakers at the event, courtesy of Re:co:

Where Are We Now?

  • James Hoffmann
    Welcome and Overview
  • Nils Erichsen
    The State of the European Coffee Market
  • Hugh Gilmartin
    The Specialty Coffee Community, and the Role of Trust
  • Pascale Schuit
    Is Coffee Sustainable?
  • Leonardo Lombardini
    World Coffee Research and the Role of Science

Where Can We Go?

  • Chahan Yeretzian
    New Roasting and Technology Paradigms
  • Michael Sheridan
    Castillo and Caturra: Exploring the Differences Using the WCR Lexicon
  • Charles Spence
    Multi-Sensory Experience and Coffee, the Role of Sound
  • Isabelle Legeron
    Lessons from the ‘Natural Wine’ Movement

How Do We Get There?

  • Camille Delebecque
    Biotechnology and Coffee Flavor
  • Morten Münchow
    Behavioral Research – A New Way to Understand the Coffee Market
  • Paul Stack
    Collaboration, a Global View

Sprudge will be attending and producing coverage from the event, and we’re particularly excited to see talks from folks like Isabelle Legeron—a leader in the natural wine movement and architect of the RAW Wine Fair—as well as the behavioral research findings of Morten Münchow and Hugh Gilmartin’s exploration of trust.

(via Re:co)

(via Re:co)

This is high-minded, high brow stuff, and probably alienates a significant portion of our readership; as more and more Sprudge readers come from outside the sometimes-cloistered upper echelon of specialty coffee, the more we try and tell stories that speak to a wide range of audience experiences and bases of knowledge. It would be easy—and boring—to just talk to the top end folks for years and years on end.

But there remains value in attending, and reporting on, events like this inaugural Re:co Symposium. Ideas developed here trickle down to the day-to-day realities of specialty coffee, and Symposium programming year after year inspires us to discover new points of interest, to pursue articles and concepts exciting that we might not have been exposed to otherwise.

Symposium matters, even if it might not matter specifically to you. We remain advocates for this event, and look forward to experiencing the new look and feel of Re:co as it happens next week in Gothenburg. Look for more coverage of the Re:co Symposium in the coming weeks on Sprudge.

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