Starting on Thursday evening, I had the idea to hook up the coffee equipment temporarily and use them for promoting the opening of the new coffee shop on campus, Vida Coffee Co, a few months early. After mulling the idea over with some associates, we decided to prepare a temporary setup on an existing cart designed for serving specialty coffee. I'll save you some of the dryer details of the next 48 hours worth of labor preparing the cart for action and skip to Saturday morning serving coffee during the parade.
My family arrived at the 812 (the building's name) at 8am. I continued preparing the cart for active use, tested out the machine, etc until the arrival of the dairy products and some extra cups a lids. At about 9:30 we opened up Vida Mobile, ready to serve small espresso drinks free of charge, promoting Vida Coffee Co.
The word "cart" as you can see, is a bit of an understatement. It is a completely self-contained, fully operational, specialty coffee preparation unit. These are utilized widely across europe by the likes of World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies and the Coffee Collective from Sweden. The concept just is not real popular in the United States yet, unfortunately for Vida Mobile. My next goal will be convincing my board of directors to allow the temporary Vida Mobile to continue to function, perhaps even opening as an early form of the shop, continuing to promote the eventual "real deal" inside the 812 itself in January of 2010. I must say, my latte art progressed very nicely throughout the day:
Some more pics of Vida Mobile:
Lord, thank you for the great time on Saturday and allowing me to serve such great coffee to so many great people. Keep my head deflated and on straight. Here we go.
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