from above: Visitors check out the acaia pearl
coffee scale; Coffee for the tasting seminar;
Brewing at the Ritual Coffee Roaster booth.
forces these conference-goers
to challenge their comfort
zones. Many people are used
to going to coffee shops where
they stick to a routine and
order what feels “safe” for
them. The shops, oriented as
they are around customer
service, oblige. But the tasting
flips this dynamic on its head.
“Suddenly [people are] walking
up to a tabletop and someone’s got a Hario on it and
their v60 and they’re doing
hand-pours, and they just
hand you a little cup and say,
‘Hey, why don’t you try this?’
And people will go, ‘Wow,’”
Sinnott explains.
CoffeeCon does more to
get every attendee saying
“wow.” Never losing sight of
the event’s entertainment
element, Sinnott says that
finding an interesting venue
is important.
“We have always avoided
a traditional conference
center,” he says. He tries to
book locations that are destinations—places with aesthetic and cultural vigor that
people would want to go
anyways. Recent sites include
Terra Gallery in San Francisco
and Zhou B Art Center in
Chicago. CoffeeCon NYC 2015
is slated for the city’s Broad
Street Ballroom.
Of course, Sinnott didn’t
go straight from high chair to
high end. While his love of
coffee has been constant, CoffeeCon emerged from his
journey toward prominence
in the specialty coffee community. For a time, his career
had nothing to do with coffee,
coffeecon 2015