Attention, coffee lovers. The inaugural Another Coffee Festival, which takes place from 3 to 6 September at Guoco Tower Urban Park, will feature 19 local Singapore roasters and 15 international names including Fuglen (Norway), Center Coffee (South Korea), and Coffee County (Japan).
For founders Leon Foo of MORNING and Will Leow of Alchemist, the festival is intended to be more than a four-day showcase of speciality coffee. Instead, they hope to create a space for coffee enthusiasts to engage directly with industry professionals and the people behind some of the world’s most renowned coffee roasters.
The idea emerged from the coffee events they attended overseas. They said that the gatherings that stayed with them were “not necessarily the biggest or most technical”, but rather the ones where “the local community had taken ownership, and where the city’s coffee culture, creative identity, and people came together”.
Despite Singapore already having an established network of cafes and roasters alongside an increasingly sophisticated audience, the pair still felt that there was a “missing middle ground between professional trade events and the everyday café experience.” Another Coffee Initiative was built to bridge that gap to serve the wider coffee community rather than to centre the founders’ individual brands.
(Related: Shaping the Singapore of tomorrow with MORNING's Leon Foo)
The festival also comes at a time when the way Singaporeans interact with speciality coffee is changing. The local coffee scene has matured significantly with more operators experimenting with new concepts and experiences, and consumers becoming increasingly knowledgeable.
Foo and Leow noted that customers are more curious about coffee’s origins, how it was processed and roasted, and why it tastes the way it does. In particular, young coffee drinkers are exploring different cafes, brewing methods, and roasters as speciality coffee becomes increasingly tied to their lifestyle. The founders also believe that “the next stage of growth is about making that knowledge and quality even more approachable, culturally relevant, and connected to the wider region.”
What's more, the festival aims to turn that curiosity into discovery through their tasting-token experience. Visitors can purchase a reusable festival cup and tasting tokens that can be exchanged for coffee throughout the roaster line up, offering them the opportunity to explore a variety of brewing styles, origins, and flavour profiles while engaging directly with the people behind each roaster.
Beyond the tastings, South Korean artist and illustrator Moonsub Shin will be creating daily live illustration sessions with custom drawings on festival cups.
For Foo and Leow, however, the festival is only the beginning. Their longer-term vision is to develop the initiative into a year-round platform for education, workshops, public talks, collaborative pop-ups, creative projects, and industry exchange.
“Ultimately, we want Singapore to be known not only as a city with excellent coffee, but also as a regional meeting point where coffee communities, ideas, and cultures naturally come together,” they said.
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