Coffee and storm troopers

Mattie and I really enjoyed our day on Tuesday.  We got to work with Chef Shelly and Janet from Village Summit.  The morning started off early with the hike to Village Summit (literally, everywhere you go is uphill here!) where we made a boat load of sandwiches for boxed lunches.   After that, we were able to meet with Shelly and Janet to start planning our banquet.   They were very helpful in channeling our ideas and Janet is super creative!  From viewing pictures of previous banquets, it seems that Village Summit always puts on a great show because of these two lovely ladies, so we are eager to work with them.  We finalized our theme… which will remain top secret, and we began assessing which direction we wanted to take the decorations and menu.   We have a lot of work ahead of us but we are both excited about the project and the possibilities!  After our meeting, we had the pleasure of going to Jittery Joe’s roasting facility to attend a coffee tasting.  UGA is remodeling their library retail location and are looking for a coffee company to contract with.  Jittery Joe’s is a local Athens coffee joint that specializes in fair trade coffee.  They are very concerned with going green; no air conditioning, gas generated roasters, composted materials, and a bicycle delivery service.  All their roasts are made to order.  This impressed me because they have 13 coffee shops and sell their cans at Whole Foods and Earth Fare.  Charlie, their pro roaster, showed us how they roast each batch.  Coffee beans start out green and become brown through the roasting process.  The longer you leave them in the roaster, the bolder flavor you will get because the oils are allowed more time to escape the beans.  They also had a small sample roaster (see picture below) where they can test blending different beans together to make new flavors.  The coffee was delicious and flavorful, and I really liked how they ran their small business.   I am definitely going to look for their beans at Whole Foods when I am back home.   That was the end of our work day, but later that night we went to play trivia with some of the crew from Bolton… we got 2^nd place and I snapped a lovely photo for you; it was in the back of someone’s car… J