The London Coffee Festival

Exhibitor at the London Coffee Festival. Picture: Federica Tedeschi

The London Coffee Festival captured the attention of thousands of London’s coffee lovers for the third year in a row.

The annual event, which is the flagship celebration of UK coffee week, is well-known for its smart format: the first two days are reserved for trade only, while the weekend is open to the public as a ticketed celebration.

Over the four-day coffee Festival, which ended yesterday, more than 15,000 coffee lovers, baristas, independent coffee shop owners and roasters, big coffee chains’ stands and industry experts, along with musicians and artists, gathered at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.

There were also tea companies and independent food and drinks producers.

However, at the heart of the Festival there were coffee samples, demonstrations from world-class baristas and several lab seminars.

“The Festival is about inspiring the industry and also inspiring consumers to learn, discover and play with coffee and London has become one of the best cities in the world for coffee. We can see the queue all around the door and all the way up to Bricklane”, the Founder of the London Coffee Festival, Jeffrey Young, said.

Mr Young, who is also the Managing Director of AllegraGroup, the organiser of this massive UK event, has pointed out that the Festival is about charity, as well.

Through the ‘Coffee Art project’, in fact, the event provides an opportunity for the coffee and foodservice industry to raise money for Project Waterfall, the charity working in partnership with WaterAid.

“This year we launched the Coffee Art Project and had over 85 enthusiastic and really committed artists who provided fantastic art works to a project that has also helped promoting the artists themselves. Next year we would like to extend the interactivity of the visitors voting for their favorite piece of work”, Mr Young said.

Talking about the 2014 edition of the Festival, it is clear that ‘interactity’ will remain the key concept of this successful coffee event.

“The consumers will still be encouraged to taste free coffee samples from some of the best places all over the country, as this is the first form of interactivity. There will be more demonstrations and visitors will also be inspired by some of the best baristas in the country to get behind the machine and actually make the coffee themselves”, Jeffrey Young added.