Cup North, a Coffee Festival to Ensure a Caffeine Kick
When it’s cold and wet outside, the best way to beat the winter blues is with a cup of something hot and fragrant. That’s why November is the perfect time for Manchester’s new coffee festival, Cup North.
Added: 14th August 2014
The brainchild of coffee lovers Hannah Davies and Ricardo Gandara, Cup North will be a gathering of coffee experts, connoisseurs and those who just love a good cuppa every now and then. There will be food, music, chocolate (and even tea!) but the star of the show will be the stuff made from the bean of the Coffee shrub.
When Davies and Gandara met at last year’s Chorlton Coffee Festival, they decided that they wanted to create an event that would be even bigger and better. An undertaking like this requires money and what better way is there to make coffee dreams a reality than with a Kickstarter campaign?
Things started slowly, so a bit of creative thinking was needed. The pair arranged a coffee tasting evening, bringing together coffee roasters from the North to showcase the good stuff. This paid off and it turns out that Mancunians love their coffee, because suddenly the donations poured in. The goal was to raise £5,000 through crowdfunding: This was met 8 hours before deadline and by deadline, the campaign had raised even more, making what could have been just a pipe dream, a reality.
Naturally the festival will showcase a range of coffee from producers all around the world but there will also be talks and workshops on everything coffee. Visitors will learn how the little red berries are grown, harvested and turned into the aromatic freshly-ground coffee that gives people a kickstart in the morning. They’ll also be able to buy a bag of beans blended especially for Cup North, produced through a collaboration between Mancunian Roasters Coffee Circle, ManCoCo, Passionfruit Coffee and Ancoats Coffee (if you can’t wait for beans, check out our range of Café Bonte beans and Fairtrade coffee options).
Cup North will even have its own version of the TED Talks, where experts will present talks about coffee and the audience can participate in the discussion afterwards. These talks will be known as Tamper Tantrum and are organised by Has Bean’s Steve Leighton and Irish outfit 3fE’s Colin Harmon. They’ll be recorded so that coffee lovers can refer to them in future.
In coffee-producing countries, the harvest is often a family affair, with everyone from Granny to the smallest kids getting involved in the picking. Cup North will sponsor the charity Coffee Kids, which is involved in projects such as education, healthcare, food security and economic diversification in Latin American communities that are dependent on coffee production. The goal of Coffee Kids is to help improve the lives of these communities and to assist them in becoming less dependent on the coffee market, which is notoriously volatile. Coffee Kids will host Cup North’s family area.
Cup North will be held on 1 and 2 November 2014 in the Artwork Atelier building in Greengate. Doors open at 10 in the morning, the perfect time for that first or maybe third cup of the day. You can visit the Cup North Website.
