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BY J. MARIE CARLANBARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Photos and graphics courtesy of Ordna Event Agency
Nordic Coffee Fest, a brand-new festival with a focus on sustainability, will take place later this month—February 24-25—at Gothenburg, Sweden’s waterfront venue Eriksbergshallen.
What to Expect
The festival’s program includes lectures and workshops featuring world-champion baristas, prize-winning roasters, and guest speakers from around the coffee world. Topics will include discussions on brewing better coffee at home, coffee roasting, trends, sustainability, and more. During the two-day event, attendees will also be able to sample coffee from top-notch roasters and purchase brewing equipment and coffee beans to enjoy at home. The festival will be held with a major focus on sustainability; all food and drink will be vegetarian and served without single-use products.
Nordic Coffee Fest is being organized by Ordna Event Agency, the creative event and marketing firm known for producing events like The Barista League (see their international 2024 schedule here). With the agency known for fun as well as sustainable events, it’s no surprise that their new festival venture will bring together an estimated 4,000 people over one weekend!
Behind the Vision
Ordna Event Agency’s founder, Steve Moloney, explains that they felt it was time for Nordic folks to have a fest all their own. “… We have been working primarily outside of Sweden and that has been an absolute honor, to get to know so many amazing coffee communities around the world,“ Steve says. “But after the pandemic, with a more Gothenburg-centric team (we are six people here in Sweden), we really wanted to do something closer to home and with the actual coffee community that we come from. That combined with a greater feeling here in the industry that there hasn’t really been any centralized events or coordinated projects that brought everyone together like back in the good old days of the Nordic Barista Cup (which has not convened since 2013).“
Additionally, Steve stresses that he wanted to create a place for coffee consumers to convene and learn more about specialty coffee and the increasing number of sustainable options. “… We felt like it was the right time for us personally and for the industry to do a festival like this, and so far the response has been even more than we could have imagined,“ Steve says.
Nordics Best Roaster
Ordna Event Agency is collaborating with Finnish Barista Champion Jarno Peräkylä to introduce the inaugural Nordics Best Roaster competition. This event will showcase the skills of 12 of the region’s coffee roasters. There will also be a Public’s Choice Award, which attendees can cast their votes for after trying the brews from competition roasters.
“Nordics Best Roaster was designed to speak to and test the real-world skills and expertise of what makes a coffee roaster great,“ Steve explains. “In our eyes, this is about their expertise in sourcing, and then translating a coffee through roast into something amazing. … Each roaster receives one mandatory coffee and sources a second coffee themselves. They roast them at home in their own roastery and bring them to the competition, where the roasters themselves (plus three industry cuppers) do the analysis. So, all of the equipment and roasting is done in real-world roasteries with the equipment that these roasters use every day.“
Festival Partners
Ordna has partnered with Daterra Coffee to source the beans that will be used for the competition. They have also partnered with Kaffebox (Norway) to offer coffee sample boxes of the competition coffees for folks to try at home. Other festival partners include Oatly, Moccamaster, Göteborg & Co, and Acme.
Are you ready to get your Nordic coffee on? Tickets are on sale now at nordiccoffeefest.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Marie Carlan (she/they) is the online editor for Barista Magazine. She’s been a barista for 15 years and writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil. When she’s not behind the espresso bar or toiling over content, you can find her perusing record stores, writing poetry, and trying to keep the plants alive in her Denver apartment. She occasionally updates her blog.
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