Last year, Sprudge.com co-founder Jordan Michelman was on-hand to witness our first festival, and this year he came back for more. Sprudge is the world’s largest coffee culture website, and Jordan, like many other folks in specialty coffee, see a lot of opportunity in the overlap of other craft cultures, like beer. So this year, in addition to attending the festival and hanging out with us, he wanted to get together and co-host a hangover party at GBH Studio. So we invited anyone who could muster the strength the next morning, or anyone who still hadn’t gotten to sleep with all that beer and espresso in their system. We gave them a little coffee, and some of our favorite beers from the festival, essentially a little hair of the dog, and some biscuits and jam from our friends at Bang Bang Pies, and we turned on the mics.
It was a great idea Jordan had that enabled us to capture some of our fresh thoughts after the festival, and dig deeper in to some of the opportunities Uppers & Downers is creating with roasters and brewers in the region. We brought up a variety of the folks like Kickapoo, Ipsento, Whiner Beer Co and 4 Letter Word Coffee, and plenty of out-of-towners still in the audience to share their thoughts as well. We had folks from New York, Indiana, Wisconsin, even Japan in attendance - all people who made the pilgrimage to Uppers & Downers this year.
To those crazy people - thank you.