Accidentally ran into Winot Coffee this morning, located in beautiful downtown Niwot (get it? no really, do you?). Turns out Winot is Folsom Street Coffee Co.’s (our link) satellite location, also serving Salt Lake Roasting Company (how much did you guys pay to get roasting.com??) coffee. The shop looks good. Nice and small, probably a decent place to work during the week. The coffee is ok. We’ve said a few times that we’ve never had a spectacular coffee at Folsom St., and truth be known, it’s often one of our go-to shops for work sessions so we’ve had a lot of their coffee, but we still like the shop. Don’t want to project too much, but the same probably goes for Winot. Had a decent cup, not awesome, but pretty good, and worth going back to.
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First, a hearty congrats to Ozo’s Greg Lefcourt for making the show at this weekend’s U.S. National Barista Championship. Greg didn’t make the finals, but getting to the stage is pretty damn exciting.
The big winner at the champs this weekend was Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, which placed its people 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th. The 1st place winner, the national champion, was Mike Phillips out of Intelligentsia’s Chicago operation; the others are from the LA shop. Congrats to Mike and Intelligentsia!
We (very) briefly wrote about Intelligentsia’s coffee in this post while on a biz trip to Chicago. We only had time for one cup each (two of us were there together) and it was served by a non-Intelligentsia shop, which is maybe why we did find it pretty damn good but not out-of-this-world spectacular. But now we have an obvious purpose to visit one of the Chicago Intelligentsia shops next time we’re on biz in the big onion (hopefully soon!). (Sorry LA, but we stay as far from you as possible. The closest I ever want to get is Ojai.) If any of you Chicago commenters want to tell us which shop to hit, please do. Judging by the comments on the post linked above, Intelligentsia has something of a fanatical following!
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Downtown Magazine is running a poll on “your favorite downtown coffee shop.” Tell them your favorite Downtown coffee shop and they will randomly select a winner for a $20 Downtown Boulder Gift Card. Love it. Can’t freaking WAIT to see the results! Seriously.
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The 2009 national barista competition is just about upon us, this year to be held in Portland (home of Stumptown — yum!). If you head to the usbc2009.com link you’ll find all of the regional winners that will be competing in the national championship. And who is that representing the Mountain region? Why, none other than Ozo’s Greg Lefcourt. (Five of the top 6 at the mountain regional were from Boulder. The other was Jesse Bladyka, whom we wrote about here.) Apparently the finals day will be webcast, although no link is apparent on the usbc2009 page.
All of those attending should enjoy Portland, easily one of the best cities in the U.S. and my personal fave. If it wasn’t for the 10 months of rain, I’d move back in a second.
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I popped into Ozo yesterday afternoon to get some work done, but was detoured by the fine staff, who wanted to alert me to the presence of Jesse Bladyka, who happened to be passing through. Jesse owns(?) Coal Creek Coffee Company out of Laramie, Wyoming, which isn’t all that far from Boulder, so we’ll consider him a brother-in-arms. Jesse took 2nd to Ozo’s Greg Lefcourt’s 1st place in the 2009 Mountain Regional Barista Competition (which, sadly, we did not cover). Jesse had brought his own espresso blend with him to Ozo yesterday and I was honored with a shot, which was supreme. Some wacked out blend of Peru and Sumatran or something like that….all I remember is that it spanned continents and it was totally worthy. One of the best 20-second aftertastes of straight espresso that I’ve ever had.
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