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Sarah and I are back in our hotel room, munching on cheap pizza before we fall into a deep jet-lagged slumber. But to be back means that we first went out, and we did. In fact, we spent all of 20 minutes in the hotel, when we arrived on our delayed flight out of Amsterdam, dropping our bags off at the room, sticking the camera out the window to snap a picture (above) before we dashed out the door to catch a cab and head across town to the Coffee Collective.

The Coffee Collective’s adventures in entrepreneurship have been documented in the last three issues of the magazine (with at least three more installments to go), and it was very cool to see what the guys have been up to in person. The shop and roastery are tucked into a small space, but the street scene is vibrant and their customers are happy, and the Collective already has plan for expansion into a training space one door down.

We made it over there just in time to listen to a presentation by Edwin Martinez from Finca Vista Hermosa in Guatemala, who in showing just how much a family farm really does take a family to run it, was accompanied by his wife and his mother. It was a terrific slideshow, talk and Q and A, as it is always interesting to hear the story of specialty coffee told from the growers’ perspective.

Tomorrow is the competitors meeting, so we’ll get a chance to meet all 52 of the national champions here to compete for the world title, in the meantime, we’ve got to get some zzzz…

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