Costa Coffee’s taster has tongue insured for £10 million … and the 2009 USBC winner
Posted by TheShot on 09 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
Oh, sure, it’s a rather frivolous promotional piece. Today’s Telegraph (UK) gives us a glimpse into how quality coffee is marketed in the UK versus here: Costa Coffee’s taster has tongue insured for £10 million – Telegraph. Whereas American coffee pros seem to go ga-ga at the altar of Q grader certification, the UK opts for a little more of the populist Hollywood glam route: i.e, my-tongue-as-Michael-Flatley‘s-legs.
“Coffee taster Gennaro Pelliccia, who samples products for Costa Coffee, has had his tongue insured for £10 million with Lloyd’s of London,” opens the article. Now does that include fire and theft? Costa Coffee runs a globally ambitious, sizeable coffee chain — not unlike the UK’s answer to Starbucks. (Last year we posted a trip report on a Costa Coffee outlet in the heart of New Delhi, India.)
The article goes on to list a variety of past “body part insurance policies.” However, it oddly missed making any mention of Angela Mount, whose taste buds were also insured for £10 million earlier this decade — though as a wine taster. In 2007, we reported on her foray into coffee tasting for enviro/ethical touchy-feely roaster, Percol.
Thus Costa Coffee seems to have missed that their press release wasn’t entirely original. Still, the investment could have been worse: they could have insured his taste buds through A.I.G.
2009 USBC: Can you feel the Intelligentsia love?
As we mentioned Friday, over the weekend we occasionally peeked at the 2009 U.S. Barista Championship on the live Ustream.tv feed. Which, unfortunately, makes for viewing that is about as dynamic as watching 50 successive mini-episodes of “Iron Chef” — a TV show to which many USBC advocates compare the event — with the added twists that the featured ingredient in every episode is coffee and that the event organizers suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
But what a weekend for Intelligentsia. As if sweeping the top three prizes at the 2009 WRBC wasn’t enough, four of the top five finishers at the USBC hailed from Intelligentsia. Talk about a juggernaut.
Congratulations to Mike Phillips of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Chicago who won the overall competition. He has our condolences as well — for being crowned the U.S. champion the same unfortunate year that the winner earned an all-expenses-paid trip to compete at the World Barista Championship in exotic … Atlanta, GA (or, as we like to call it, Mylanta).
2 Comments »
on 09 Mar 2009 at 10:02 pm +00:00T 1.mike phillips said …
yeah… Denmark would have been nice, or perhaps some lovely producer origin. I have no gripes about Atlanta though. Judging from the Octane baristas I know, the city must have something good going for it. Shout outs to your blog, i always enjoy your posts.
on 10 Mar 2009 at 7:44 am +00:00T 2.TheShot said …
Cheers, Mike. And fantastic work. That Intelligentsia L.A. posse has quite a lot going for them, so it was nice for this Chicago native to see you win one for the mothership.
Best of luck at the WBC. (We have good friends in Atlanta, so we can’t knock it too much. But compared to travels to places like Copenhagen and Tokyo…)