The organizers of this year’s Eat Real Festival decided to group all of the coffee folks together into a “Coffee Pavilion”, which included Blue Bottle Coffee, Ritual Coffee Roasters, The Bicycle Coffee Company, Bloom (a new coffee delivery service), Barefoot Coffee Roasters, Roast Co, and Mr. Espresso. Sweet Maria’s also joined in with some home roasting demonstrations. All of the good stuff in one place – Jack London Square, Oakland, California.
Blue Bottle was offering tours of their roastery, which is only 2 blocks away from Jack London Square. After going over the history of the company, Bennett served samples of their 3 Africans blend to the audience, brewed in a Chemex:
Bennett described how coffee cherries are processed and showed a few examples of beans that had been wet and dry-processed.
The tour continued with a description of the roasting process (2 giant Probat roasters in this case) and then a visit to the barista training lab, where Bennett described the training process and explained some of the training equipment.
Back at the festival, Chris from Ritual Coffee Roasters gave an Aeropress demonstration in the coffee pavilion, which had been decorated with coffee-themed posters by Bloom.
Chris showed off his favorite Aeropress recipe. 16 grams of beans (I believe he was using their El Angel from Costa Rica):
with a grind somewhere between a drip and espresso. He put 2 paper filters in the Aeropress for more back-pressure and then poured water that had been off of a boil for a few minutes.
He sealed the Aeropress by just barely putting the plunger in, then let it rest for 60 seconds. After 60 seconds, he agitated the bloom with a spoon, and then waited another 60 seconds (I think?) before finally plunging: 
It was a great cup. Fairly fruit-forward with sweet tart notes that got stronger as the coffee cooled.
Ritual’s Sputnik is usually a fixture at the festival, but they were not allowed to bring the trailer to this year’s festival due to some Alameda County restrictions. But the baristas were cool with it:
I wanted to have some of Bicycle Coffee’s nitro brew and something from Barefoot, but I was already too wound up on caffeine to have any more..
