Jeffrey Young Spills the Beans on Starting Coffee Festivals around the World

“We somehow created a wildfire of coffee festivals around the world.”

The Los Angeles Coffee Festival founder, Jeffrey Young, originally started a coffee research group in 1999 and from that, grew a portfolio of exciting coffee festivals from the world.

Q: How did this all get started?

I started researching market trends in UK on the coffee chain market. It was the beginning of a big period of change. It was the second wave of coffee back then – the arrival of big chain concepts like Starbucks.

We wanted to bring our research to more life and set up an events division. At first our events were lecture-led conferences – a bit more dry, similar to TED talks, around insight and leadership around the coffee business. We started with an event called The European Coffee Symposium. In 2010, we then launched the first London Coffee Festival, which was consumer-driven. This was a huge success and we then took it to Amsterdam, and New York. Afterwards we decided we have to go Los Angeles, and soon followed by followed by Cape Town and Milan. We are now building to other parts of the world.

Q: What are the trends in coffee now?

We are seeing a lot more beautiful aesthetics, we’ve moved on beyond 3rd wave of craft coffee and 4th wave of coffee science to now the 5th wave of coffee, which is scaling the boutique business. We see a lot of concepts built for the millennial audience and done with a lot of finesse, a lot of technology built into these businesses. It’s like the craft of coffee meets the aesthetics of coffee, with places like Blue Bottle, Starbucks Reserve and Bluestone Lane.

Q: Tell us more about The Los Angeles Coffee Festival?

The festival aims to encapsulate the new lifestyle of coffee. We share knowledge on the craft of coffee making – such as the science of a perfect pourover, and we also celebrate the creative side of coffee through latte art, etc. It’s really something for everyone. We have a very beautiful line-up of content from coffee lectures and demonstrations to coffee art to our music program to our Live Kitchen. Our Live Kitchen helps ensure that we recognize the importance of food to the coffee experience.

We also have charity angle to all our festivals. We raise money for clean water (Project Waterfall) and coffee communities around the world.

Q: What do you hope that people get out of these festivals?

I was originally inspired by a coffee festival called the Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia. What I liked about the Aroma Festival was that it was not just about tasting coffee, but also about community and creativity. There was an image that came out of the festival where artists had created a Mona Lisa out of different degrees of darkness in coffee cups. That’s when the light came on for me. I wanted to make our festival fun and also explore the creativity of coffee. Our festivals aim to create a community under one roof across all the microcosms of coffee. The events are created to be multi-sensory in sound, taste, texture and visual. Our first festival in London was 2010, and our portfolio has really grown from there. We’ll have 9 coffee festivals around the world next year, including our 10th year in London, where it all started.

Q: What are goals for the future of these coffee festivals?

Our goal is to give these events a hybrid of consumer and business perspectives. The London Festival became our model of a successful coffee festival (audiences are 30,000 strong). Our challenge is make LA and NY even bigger than London. As we know, Americans may have even a greater love of coffee than do the British.

Q: Do you have a coffee ritual? Any favorite coffee drinks?

My new coffee ritual when I’m in London is visiting my own coffee shop (England’s Lane), which I originally said I’d never do. But my local café became vacant and somehow I became a co-owner. So now my ritual is going to my own café in the morning and having a flat white (homage to the Australian heritage).

As the day goes on, I might go to a cortado, less milk but richer and then go to black coffee later in the day. So less milk as the day goes on. My future plans are probably to moderate my coffee drinking a bit. I find coffee to be such an inspiring beverage and I’m very lucky to be able to do what I do. I never in my early days imagined running an events business, let alone a coffee festival portfolio. I started off by tracking the progress of coffee trends and that brought me to festivals, and finally led me to do the thing I never said I’d do – which is to open a café. It is truly magical.