One of the best times I’ve ever had in my coffee career was at an event where I played a coffee-version of Family Feud. I was on a team with former guests Alicia Adams and Erica Escalante, and we played this silly game on stage with folks cheering us on and having a good time.

Thinking about community events for an industry is an interesting challenge. Balancing the tone between useful and educational and fun and exciting is difficult, and it’s no surprise that the team at the Barista League thinks a lot about putting on a dynamic event that touches on both ends of the spectrum. The Barista League is a series of coffee competitions, usually a handful a year, that travel across the globe and provides enriching, community-driven events that are fun for everyone. If you go to a Barista League party, it can feel wonderfully chaotic and loose, which can hide just how much work goes into an event feeling effortlessly fun.

My guest today is Angela Ferrara, one of the folks who puts together Barista League events. Although these are coffee-specific events, the ideas that Angela touches on are universal to any industry looking to create tools for their community. In this episode, Angela talks about how she got involved in the Barista League - she was a competitor herself - and how that transformed into a role putting on some of the most interesting events in coffee.

It’s also strangely serendipitous that we recorded during the current global pandemic because the Barista League puts on events - which necessitate people gathering in places. But just last week, The Barista League announced that they would move to a digital competition—Angela has more details on this but it shows the power of their organization—and their ability to adapt and respond to the needs of a community in real-time. Here’s Angela: