[adsense]
San Francisco openly embraces the thriving coffee culture more than any other city in the US, except for maybe Seattle. Now, the newly formed Bay Area Coffee Community (BACC) will kick off with a SIX MONTH long latte art competition that ends in June. Molly Gore of the BACC says “It’s a perfect way to celebrate the craft of coffee. It’s enormously entertaining, suspenseful, and whimsically outlandish if you’ve never encountered it.” The competitions are open to anyone who wants to come, and the competitor slots are currently full. 32 baristas will be competing throughout 6 rounds, with 3 winners being chosen in each round. The judges in each competition will be different, and no cafe reps will be allowed to judge. The BACC really focuses on fairness in the competition, and throughout its company.
The BACC was founded to encourage a sense of community in the world of coffee and to help bring sustainability into focus. Gore says “The Bay Area is a promised land of innovation, gastronomic and otherwise, and when you have this many people loving what they do, it becomes an incredibly exciting atmosphere in which to share our ideas, knowledge, and passion for our respective crafts.”
Interestingly, and admiringly, the BACC is sponsored by several coffee brands, but it upholds its policy not to exchange advertising for sponsorship. We love this. In order for a coffee company to gain any sort of exposure through BACC, they need to host an event. The website states of the matter “We want the Bay Area Coffee Community event series to be a democratic platform where we celebrate specialty coffee and community; not cash donations.”
Gore concludes on the competition by saying “Even if you know nothing about coffee, how can you miss a high-stakes, competitive milk-pouring competition?” True.