Specialty Coffee Expo
We Took on SCA Expo!
SCA Expo is a weekend dedicated to the Specialty Coffee community. Three days in a massive convention center filled with hundreds of vendors and manufacturers, all looking to form connections and show off the best new products to the thousands of attendees. Being in Chicago this year - only a short plane ride or road trip away from Pittsburgh - we had to take advantage of the opportunity and have some great folks represent De Fer on the world stage! We had the pleasure of brewing coffee at the Third Wave Water booth for a while, serving up some of our delicious Flower Show, and handing out sample bags to anyone with room in their bags to take some coffee home with them.
Cupping amazing coffees with Cofinet! This table was filled with competition grade coffees, all grown in Colombia. Some were from the same producer as our coffee Castillo!
Coffee, Coffee…and More Coffee!
Both inside the Expo hall and around Chicago, there was truly an endless supply of coffee to go around. We thought we’d been caffeinated before - but this was something else! The days started by checking out local coffee shops and Chicago staples like Intelligentsia, Lost Larson, Metric, Dark Matter, and plenty of others before the Expo was open. After heading to the convention center we were immediately greeted with coffee from this years featured producing country - Guatemala - and hundreds of other folks excited to spend the day surrounded by all things coffee. The first day was a bit of a whirlwind, just because of how much there was around us, so we took our time to make note of what we wanted to check out the following day. We spent a good amount of time hanging at the Third Wave Water booth with Gray who was brewing our coffee, and had an awesome time chatting with folks enjoying some brews of Flower Show!
Brewing our coffee on some sweet machines like the XBloom Studio and Decent Espresso Machine at the Third Wave Water booth!
Making Connections
The second day at Expo was spent taking some time to meet a lot of the folks we’ve only been in contact with through email - the amazing people that make what we sip on every day even remotely possible. People like Ben and Taylor from Crop-to-Cup, Rodrigo and his family over at Bean Belt, Samuel at Keffa, Ana from Cofinet, our friends Angela and Ivanov over at Tio Conejo, and countless other awesome people. We also walked the floor looking for the next great products that would bring value to our cafes and improve what we offer to you (and there’s definitely some great stuff out there)!
As our last day at Expo began to wind down, we found ourselves headed to Metric Coffee for an Industry after party! We spent time meeting awesome people, sipping on some tasty wine, watching an early screening of a documentary about Chicago’s coffee culture, and having a great evening.
Speaking for all of us at De Fer, we can’t wait to be able to attend another SCA Expo! We had an amazing experience seeing just how large our little corner of the world can be, and all of the people that make it so special.
Check out our reel to see what the weekend looked like for us on our Instagram!
Have questions about expo? Want to hear more about the coffee we sipped on, or our time exploring Chicago? Reach out to us at talk@defer.coffee to continue the conversation!
