Student Product Presentations

Today started with a bang -- student presentations on various products. This is a test run for our final projects, which will be presenting a business plan for a new restaurant. Everyone chose a product, and had to present about the characteristics, grades, history, and purchasing of said topic. Richard stressed the use of PowerPoint, which some students did use, some to hilarious effect, some to...less than hilarious. Others just gave out a handout and spoke, some did...less. The topics ranged from blackened spices to mission figs to spinach to horsemeat (which only became illegal a couple of years ago). I did canned tomatoes, and exported my presentation above for all y'all to peruse. The export function didn't get the animations, in which the word "SEX" flashes over selected slides to keep things humorous -- the first, the last, and of course, the slide with a picture of a pizza.

Best of today's bunch was probably LI Jenni's, in which she shared he passion for specialty coffee -- she's a manager of a Northfork beanery, and really knows her stuff. No Powerpoint to lean on, she brought in a mess of visual aids, from a sack used to transport the raw beans to raw and roasted beans to the grading and testing. She had this cool kit of a few dozen vials of essential oils, which is used to train the coffee nose. She had samples of all different kinds of bean rejects, from insect damage to "floaters" (when the beans are washed, the ones that come to the top have gaps in their structure, which lead to uneven roasting and will give bitter tones to an otherwise properly roasted batch). I don't even like coffee, but Jenni made me want to go to a fancy coffee shop and taste a flight of brews with her.