Anastasia Chovan looked out to the sold-out crowd at the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her audience was a diverse crowd of coffee enthusiasts and professionals, more than two hundred and fifty in total, over half of whom were attending a Barista Nation event for the very first time. For much of the last three years, Chovan has taken the Barista Nation show on the road, setting up an impressive series of programs in cities like Portland, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Paris. These events are sponsored in part by her employer, Unic, but as she stressed to the early morning crowd in San Francisco, “It’s not a Unic event, it’s not a David Rio event, it’s your event.”

San Francisco-based David Rio Chai are longtime sponsors of these events, and David Rio’s Brian Cornelson served as the event’s MC, taking the stage to introduce the day’s theme (every Barista Nation event has a different theme, which is part of what makes each one uniquely different). The third annual San Francisco Barista Nation was centered around the concept of The Good Café. Brian asked, “What is it about the human condition that makes us want to congregate ...