We got back from the Specialty Coffee Expo in Cape Town about a week ago, but it’s taken that long to recover 🙂
We were absolutely blown away by the back-to-back excitement from all of you legends in Cape Town. From new faces to old friends, we couldn’t be more excited about the Bluebird fam down in the Mother City.

The Specialty Coffee Expo took place at Maker’s Landing, V&A Waterfront from the 27-29th October 2023.

The event invites the best specialty coffee roastery’s in South Africa to come and share what they’ve been working on: special release coffees, exciting flavour pairings, signature drinks, exclusive coffees and much more! We were also joined by many prolific equipment suppliers and raw material suppliers to the industry.

We left for Cape Town excited to meet a couple of our longest-standing customers: subscribers who’ve received our boxes for 3+ years, web-store regulars and some familiar faces from our cafe in KZN. We were honoured to get to share coffee with so many of you.

So, What Coffee Did We Bring?

For this event, we wanted to focus heavily on our new Special Release coffees. It just so happened that the timing of the expo was a week before we released one of the most exclusive coffees in our subscription program and a couple of weeks after we received our Stronghold S7X, allowing us to bring a very broad range of coffee to brew and sell.
Our filter bar consisted of Wilton Benitez Sudan Rume, Janson Gesha Lot 162 and El Socorro Washed Gesha.
Our espresso coffee ranged throughout the weekend:
Friday: Gatomboya AA
Saturday: La Palma & El Tucan Pink Bourbon
Sunday: La Palma & El Tucan Pink Bourbon & Asodiet

Main Takeaways

1. We love expo 🙂
   Wowwww did we have a great time chatting to you guys. Thank you for coming through and engaging with us, we are so honoured to have customers that match our excitement for these incredible coffees.
2. Nanolots nanolots nanolots
   We were absolutely stoked with the range of coffees we were able to bring to this event and couldn’t be prouder of the producers we get to represent. Once again, we couldn’t have foreseen the love we would get about our coffee menu.
3. Filter coffee vs. espresso-based
   Cape Town specialty nerds love their filter coffee. We brewed so much filter coffee over the weekend and we are stoked to see the market moving in this direction.

We are looking forward to the next edition of this event in Fourways Mall next year!
See you there Joburg!