Fresh off the heels of launching a Korean language version of their coffee variety tree, our friends and partners at Cafe Imports are teaming up with Namusairo Coffee in Seoul to throw a fabulous in-season cupping at Namusairo’s cafe on November 21st. Guests will receive gift bags including coffees from Namusairo, a poster version of the coffee tree, and other goodies. The event’s flier is below.
Sprudge readers might notice that we’ve featured Namusairo Coffee a few times recently on the site. The Seoul-based company has two cafes (both in the Jongnu district); earlier this year they became among the first Korean specialty coffee roasters to be served publicly at a United States cafe when Ascension Coffee in Dallas added them to their multi-roaster menu. Namusairo had previously landed in America as part of the 2014 Coffee Collection, designcoffee‘s box set of coffees from eight of Korea’s premiere roasters, previously covered by Sprudge here. Namusairo owner Jun Sun Bae’s addition to the collection was the much talked about Love Letter blend, a 50/50 mixture of a caffeinated Kenya Gachombe and a decaffeinated Colombia.
While all eight of the roasters in designcoffee’s box are well-worth checking out, we’d like to take a moment to shout out another Korean company–Coffee Graffiti, whose owner Jong Hoon Lee is the current Korean Barista Champion, and will represent South Korea at the 2015 World Barista Championship in Seattle, Washington. A shipment of coffees from Coffee Graffiti arrived recently at Sprudge Headquarters here in Portland, and if our Instagram account is any barometer, we were impressed.
This is a long way of saying that in 2014, the worlds of progressive American and Korean coffee have started sharing, shipping, and trading in ways we’ve not seen before. If it means more delicious Korean roasters showing up in the United States, we’re all for it. Who’s going to open the first all-Korean specialty roaster cafe in the United States? Can it please be in Koreatown in Los Angeles so we can go to The Prince afterwards? Maybe hang out in The Line Hotel lobby, catch a DJ set? Seems like a perfect fit.