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OFF THE WIRE Continued from page 18 beans. "Their job is just as important as the coffee itself," Rebekah Yli-Luoma says. "I want to make people more aware of that and put them on a pedestal." Wille Yli-Luoma adds that the competition allows the staff to share their operating style with others in the industry. "It's not like, 'Oh, we need to win,'" he says. "It's more that we feel con- fident after two-and-a-half years of being open. We know better now how to find coffee, how to roast it and how to present it to customers." Other shop owners see the competition as a potential busi- ness builder. Pam Thomas—who opened The Place to Be Café in Canby, Ore., about 18 months ago—says her young company is still trying to gain traction and make a name for itself. "The chance to be listed as the Northwest's best little coffeehouse would be huge for us," she says. "Even if we don't win, just being named in the top whatever could get us some good publicity and make us more of a destination." The fact that media buzz tends to stem from competitions and best-of lists is something Coffee Fest's Heilbrunn certainly had in mind when planning the event. He says, in fact, that the Best Coffeehouse venture has already garnered a bigger press response that any other Coffee Fest event. One final competition guideline to note: Coffee companies that have a chain of stores are eligible, but they will be judged on one individual store/staff. "They still have to pick one location, and that's the store that could be America's best coffee shop," says Heilbrunn. "Even if it's a Starbucks, that's cool. But that doesn't mean Starbucks in general has won." —Dan Leif To submit your café to the Central or Eastern regional of America's Best Coffeehouse Competition, go to coffeefest.com. For more thoughts on competition and business development from Heart Roasters co-owners Wille and Rebekah Yli-Luoma, go to freshcup.com for a Web-only story. WILD-COFFEE DISCOVERY IN SUDAN OPENS PRODUCTION POSSIBILITIES It was the second day in South Sudan's Boma Plateau for a global team of researchers, and morale was starting to slip. The group, assembled by nonprofit agricultural organization World Coffee Research, was in Africa searching for wild coffee plants, but their travels had bore no fruit. "I was kind of anxious about it all," says Timothy Schilling, executive director of World Coffee Research and leader of the expedition. "Nothing is known about that area—it's probably the wildest place on the inhabitable planet. We were going by hearsay; we could have easily gone in there and not found anything." Fortunately for both the researchers and the specialty coffee industry, the team found something that holds exciting prospects for the future: 75 Arabica accessions growing wild in the Boma Plateau, as well as the possible discovery of a new coffee species. The researchers collected leaf samples that are currently undergo- 20 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com