How Can You Have A Convention In The Caribbean Without Real Coffee?

One of the things that irked me at the Trade Investment Convention (2008) was the lack of coffee I could find. Granted, I love coffee and am of the belief that I operate at a less than optimal level without it, so this is personal. And yet, lest we forget, the huge land mass to the West of Trinidad and Tobago constitutes Latin America. To the North, aside from the Spanish speaking islands, there is a country known as the United States (you may have heard of it). While not close, European Union visitors are also participants in a culture that Trinidad and Tobago business has yet to grasp in a meaningful way. It is a very simple thing to create given water and ground beans.

It is a thing called coffee.

Granted, at the convention I ended up doing shots of instant coffee from a machine (!) to appease my morning craving in the food court area. After buying those, I noticed a small sign to the right which mentioned French Press coffee available. When I had first walked in and registered, I was told that there was coffee on the first aisle (but no one was there). The Costa Ricans had coffee, I'm sure, but they seemed to be out when I hovered past with a tank low on caffeine.

Trinidad and Tobago, through entrepeneurship and making coffee something exclusive and overpriced, has coffee shops - carbon copies of Starbucks that is called 'Rituals', and they tend to have decent coffee. Not great coffee, mind you, but decent. But it is, at the least, coffee made fresh by hot water passing through ground beans (as opposed to passing hot water through ground beans).

There is a place in the world for instant coffee. That place is on camping trips where there is a possibility of running out of ground beans. There really is no other excuse for instant coffee. There is no excuse not to make instant coffee - the process itself is so simple that angry-poets-who-cannot-write-or-perform have become barristas while waiting for their big break after death. This is not to say all barristas are created equal, some elevate beyond science and transform coffee culture into Art, but the point is that even bad poets can make good coffee.

And yet, at a trade convention in the Caribbean, next to Latin America, coffee was as hard to find as an honest politician. Why? Such simple things make an event much more worthwhile. You can show me wonders in technology, agriculture, finance and even government works - but if I have no coffee buzz, I am less likely to engage fully. Coffee connects people in ways that Trinbagonians are only beginning to understand.

A note to people having conventions in Trinidad and Tobago, especially for international audiences: Get Coffee - the Real Stuff - and Spare No Expense. Good coffee in the world means good business; it is the ink that flows through the hearts of business to the hands that sign the contracts. It is the PG universal language; it is the magic bean that connects.

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