Amsterdam "Tea & Coffee World Cup" edition 2001

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This year, from July 26 to 28, the "Tea & Coffee World Cup" was held in Amsterdam. The T&C WC is a trade show for just about everything remotely related to the tea & coffee industry; from huge coffee roasters to tea bag making machines & everything in between.
You can find out more about this annual show at their site - including an almost complete floorplan.

Suffice to say, if you're, like me, crazy about both tea & coffee, this is the greatest fun park on earth & you just have to see it. Fortunately, I was kindly invited by Patrick van den Noortgaete from Coffee4you & I had the opportunity to spent all three days at this trade show.

Click on the links on the left if you want to skip the text & move on to the pix.

The "short" version...

Of course, there were coffee booths, some owned by growers, some by trade boards, some by brokers. There was sweet & fruity Ethiopian, very yummy & smooth Haitian Blue, Kaanapali (absolutely loved the sweet Yellow Caturra peaberries!), interesting Indian, nice sweet Zambian, lively & complex Yauco Selecto, pretty PNG's, lovely Guats (the Huehue was very nice & bright!), smoooooooooth Kauai, etc., etc....
One might say, I tasted quite a few at the stands & got a couple of very yummy green bean samples.

Besides booths promoting coffees, there was the hardware to separate the bolts (& other foreign material) from the beans, gear to analyse bean samples for defects, coffee roasters (LARGE [Probat, Diedrich] & smaller [STA, HW, Imex]) & "throw perfectly decent coffee in at one end, collect pre-ground, pre-staled vacuum bricks at the other end"-machines (can anyone come up with a better name for these?). Then there were 'spresso machines (both cool gear [LM, Espressionistic, Wega] & uncool pod stuff), balancing vac's, moka brewers [Frabosk, D'Ancap] & cups & saucers, etc.

It was nice talking with the people at the booths - though some seemed a little disappointed I was merely a consumer &definitely not going to spend a couple of K$'s at the show, I had some very nice & interesting conversations. Coolest was chatting with the growers & their rep.'s - these people clearly showed a pride about their products & appeared to enjoy the positive feedback. It probably isn't too often they meet consumers at such events.

Best 'spresso was prolly at the Espressionistic site - beans provided by the Golden Coffee Box, IIRC. Worst was from a Miko pod (bitter, overextracted 15s "slosh" shot) - could've bean the machine, 'course, but it was awful.
Also had the pleasure of meeting mr Ian Bersten, see the new Imex roaster & its inventor mr. Eugene Song, tasted an *almost* decent pod-shot from the "1,2,3 espresso" 'slot' machines & .... well, I could prolly go on for hours & not have covered all of it.

I had a good time, all three days - I stayed there until the very end & it's great to have seen the whole show.

....Oh yeah, almost forgot, there were some very lovely teas as well - of course, that's a very different subject...

Hall 1. Hall 2.