Jim Currie’s favorite coffee preference is the next one he tries. In 2024, he visited Luma Coffee Roasters in Hammond, La., after its owner Devin Masters invited Currie to try a special expensive coffee he had bought. The coffee was grown in the shady mountainous areas of Nepal in Southeast Asia. Masters poured him a nice cup, and his only request was that Currie tell him what flavor he identified. After a few sips, he came to one conclusion: It tasted like Skittles.

“How unexpected that you taste a cup of coffee and it tastes like Skittles? My brain couldn’t even understand that,” Currie told the Mississippi Free Press. “Those types of experiences are my favorite because when someone can show you something that is so outside of your range of experience, it sort of just blows your mind a little. Coffee can do that. It’s done it for me, and it can do that for other people too.”

Last year, Mississippi was one of 10 states with lowest coffee consumption across the country with 1.58 cups drank per day, Balance Coffee reported. That may change with the launch of the first Jackson Coffee Festival on Saturday, May 10, 2025, at the Mississippi Trade Mart. More than a dozen specialty coffee roasters will pour samples of their best products, and guests will be able to attend classes, see demonstrations and learn about the coffee flavor wheel, among other activities.

“ We feel by bringing these industry resources together to the people in the South who can work in coffee, there’s going to be a whole layer of innovation and flavor explosion, and the rest of the nation is going to be following us, not leaving us,” Currie said.

NOLA Coffee Festival co-founder Jim Currie stands at a coffee farm in Honduras for coffee brand Cafe de Mi Pueblo. The New Orleans native got into the coffee industry as a hobby after he retired. Photo courtesy Jim Currie

Jim Currie is retired, but he was bored and needed a hobby. The New Orleans native worked with his friend Kevin Richards, who was also retiring, and they decided to collaborate on a project that would give back to New Orleans and their state. In researching interests, the duo stumbled onto the coffee industry and its history in New Orleans.

“The port of New Orleans was the main port of entry for all the coffee in America for about 100 hundred years, so Central and South America coffee growers. The port was well known back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, so the whole coffee industry of New Orleans was based here,” Currie explained. “Somewhere around the 1980s, that changed, and a lot of these guys that work in coffee disappeared or retired.”

With the rise of home-internet access, people gained the newfound ability to purchase goods online, limiting the amount of human interaction that producers, retailers and consumers shared—as buying and shipping coffee to one’s home became as simple as clicking a button. Currie and Richards wanted to give the coffee industry some love and rebuild those relationships, particularly with foreign countries.

“We want to make it more about people again, so we started the NOLA Coffee Festival as a time and place where people could meet, work together, get to know each other in the coffee business and help professionals get stronger,” he said.

Green coffee beans are unroasted coffee beans, which are raw unprocessed seeds of the coffee plant that are typically processed and then roasted before being consumed. Photo courtesy Jim Currie

The NOLA Coffee Festival is entering its third year, but Currie and Richards didn’t want to stop with New Orleans. Feeling that southern coffee gets the short end of the stick compared to coffee grown on the East and West coasts, they decided to expand the festival to other areas within the southern region of the United States.

“They don’t send sales reps down here. They don’t host events down here. We were getting overlooked, and we said, ‘We can complain, or we can start our own party and invite everybody to come to it,’” Currie added.

While the New Orleans festival draws thousands of people, they noticed a lack of visitors from Mississippi and other parts of Louisiana. This year, they have organized one-day events in Jackson, Miss., and Lafayette, La. Next year, they will choose a city in Alabama to host an event in as well.

“The idea is we want the whole region to come together and kind of benefit from this energy around coffee,” the retiree said.

‘A Better Coffee Adventure’

CUPS Espresso Café, which has locations across the greater Jackson area, will be leading a coffee-cupping presentation to explain the nature of quality in green coffee. Sixty guests will have the opportunity to taste cupping-coffee samples to understand the variation in flavor from different coffee farms in different countries.

“Cupping is a traditional method of quality control and flavor assessment that is done both at the farm, before the coffee buyer selects the beans, and after the ship arrives in America, to confirm the flavor and quality is intact,” Rogers said in a press release about the upcoming Jackson festival.

Northshore Specialty Coffee owner Trey Malone will be giving out cold-brew samples and teaching an “Intro to Cold Coffee” class at the festival.

“One of the greatest innovations of the past few years is new variations on cold-brewed coffee,” Malone said in a press release. “We have some of the country’s best cold brew happening right here in Mississippi. We are thrilled to celebrate that hometown innovation with our friends and neighbors.”

An exhibitor demonstrates pouring, a technique that slowly adds water to roasted coffee in an effort to control and optimize the flavor extraction, at the NOLA Coffee Festival in 2024. Photo courtesy Jim Currie

Oxford, Miss., coffee shop Exploradora Coffee will also be participating in the festival. Alison Gray Anderson, the mom, traveled to countries selling coffee and noted that there were some women owned businesses that weren’t being amplified in a male-dominated field. Partnering with her daughters, Wade and Hollis Johnson, she set out to highlight and platform women in the coffee industry.

“They built their whole business around this idea of finding women-owned farms and women-produced coffee and bringing that back to Mississippi and making great coffee with it,” Currie explained. “They take the profits they generate to help low-income people in need. One program in particular helps African American single moms with house payments. They give them a grant for $1,000 a month for a full year to help them get back on their feet.”

Coffee is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water. It touches every culture, every cuisine. It can be brewed eight different ways come light or dark, but regardless of its form, it’s an affordable luxury readily available to everyone, Currie expressed.

“Coffee is so complex and has so many different variations (that) we can’t possibly show all of them to you. So instead, we want to inspire you to explore on your own,” he said. “And by giving you some coffee education, we think we’re equipping you to have a better coffee adventure.”

The Jackson Coffee Festival will officially launch Saturday, May 10, 2025, at the Mississippi Trade Mart (1200 Mississippi St., Jackson). The exhibit hall will run Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $10 for general admission, and parking is free. Starting in April, tickets will be available at local coffee shops and online at jacksoncoffeefestival.com.

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‘Hometown Innovation’: Coffee Roasters Share Specialty Blends at Jackson Festival

‘A Better Coffee Adventure’

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