Posts Tagged ‘Cupping’

Posted on April 24, 2009 - by deCadmus

Still Crazy About Seattle

Despite the rain, and the blustery breezes. Despite the strep throat, and bronchitis. Despite the fact it would appear the city of my birth might see me catch my death, I love Seattle, still.

Seattle remains a guiding star for coffee. From Vivace to Zoka, Trabant to Victrola, Tully’s to Caffe Vita, and — of course — the omnipresent Starbucks and hundreds of happy, independent retailers, coffee houses, espresso carts and hole-in-the-wall walk-ups, the city teems with caffeinated masses, most of ‘em tanked up on some damn fine coffees served by folks who know their way round the business end of a portafilter. I’m impressed as I can be with places like Stumptown that hold daily cupping events so folks just walkin’ in off the street can sample a flight of coffees from all over the world, and compare and contrast flavors and aromas, body and balance, while elbow to elbow with the pros.

I hope I can stay longer next time… provided the place doesn’t kill me, first.

Posted on September 3, 2007 - by deCadmus

Rwanda’s Golden Cup — The Results Are In!

It’s Labor Day in these United States — a celebration of the working stiff, the last gasp of Summer — and to mark the event I’ll be… laboring on the garage. (sigh)

I can’t help but take a moment, however, to mark the outstanding results of Rwanda’s Golden Cup competition and auction. In a few short years Rwanda has emerged from its national nightmare to become an increasingly prominent player in the specialty coffee trade, and perhaps nothing to-date has marked this more significantly than the results of the events of the past few days.

The cupping jury has seen some phenomenal coffees, some scoring as high as 95 — even 98! — and the results of the auction itself are now in. The winning bidders? The usual suspects: Stumptown walks away with the top lot from the Muyongwe cooperative, at $25 per pound. Lots from Ngoma, Karaba and Kanzu fetched in the neighborhood of $15/lb. and winning bidders included Zoka, Counter Culture and Intelligentsia.

Look for some of these stunning coffees at a winning roaster — perhaps even before the turn of the year.

Posted on May 12, 2007 - by deCadmus

More Voices, More Views, More Coffee

Some updating to ye ol’ Blogroll is somewhat overdue, at least so far as the college of coffee blogs goes. There’s lots of interesting new voices out there — folks who are pushing the envelope on roasting, brewing, pulling shots and delivering an over-the-top customer experience — and at the same time making some of the old-guard “coffee men” raise their eyebrows, first in alarm, and then in appreciation for what they find in their cup.

• Stephen Morrissey is barista trainer at Bewleys Coffee Co in Dublin Ireland, and his site — Flying Thud — documents his adventures in coffee. Lots of espresso porn, of course, but he’s also a fan of the drip. His posts will make you pine for European coffee shops you’ve never been to.
• Barrett Jones is a Canadian national barista champ and until recently worked the bar at Vancouver’s most excellent Caffe Artigiano. His site — Dwell Time — offers a glimpse of the extraordinary Vancouver coffee scene.
• Stephen Leighton’s blog — Has Bean — offers the perspective of a coffee guy who sources and roasts some fairly stupendous coffees, which sadly I know by reputation, only. (The reputation is certainly deserved: UKBC winner James Hoffman poured his way to the top of competition with a Has Bean custom blend.) Stephen’s been known to drop by here from time to time to offer an insightful comment or two.
• And last but not least — Barismo — a Boston based group blog contributed to by Jaime, Ben, Ben and Silas. Their writing spans coffee roasting, cupping and delivering a top-tier coffee experience in the coffee house. Oh! And they have a shiny cool tamper design.

Go visit one and all. Frequently. Maybe they’ll each get the hint to post more often.

Posted on May 10, 2007 - by deCadmus

Accounting for Taste: A Model Major Article

The current issue of Roast Magazine features an informative and very well acquainted guide to experiencing the flavors and aromas of coffee, covering matters anatomical, physiological and — for good measure — psychological, too:

“Say you’re having a rotten dayâ€â€?everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, and you need to cup one final batch of samples before you can leave for the day. Well, you might think twice about cupping those samples, because there’s a good chance your mood will alter the way you perceive the coffee. Your senses are all linked together with your brain, which also controls your thoughts and emotions. With all this going on at the same time, it is possible to allow mood to overlap with sensory evaluation, causing a misinterpretation of what you are really experiencing in that cup of coffee.

In order to get a true idea of what you’re tasting, your mind needs to be clear of clutter and stress.”

(more…)

Posted on July 19, 2006 - by deCadmus

Tasting: Green Mountain’s Special Reserve Colombian Dos Quebradas

• Rating: Rating:

I’ll admit some prejudice — not altogether unwarranted — against Colombian coffee. Let’s face it, we’ve *all* been told for years now how Colombian coffee is mountain-grown; that only the ripest beans are picked by Juan Valdez (and his faithful little burro). And even while the Colombian Coffee Federation was feeding us this hugely successful marketing campaign they were rounding up beans from all over and carting them to vast processing mills and creating a single, homogeneous flavor profile. And we consumers were most all of us buying our 100% Colombian coffee — the best coffee in the world, mind you — pre-ground in its little red vacuum-packed can and we were satisfied, perhaps… if a little underwhelmed. (more…)

Posted on February 22, 2006 - by deCadmus

Tasting Two by Two

And the number shall be… three?

There’s a tried and true technique called triangle cupping that’s used to identify which of three coffees is different. (For you Sesame Street fans, it’s a game of One of These Things Is Not Like The Others.) You take two samples of one coffee, and one of another; you randomize them so you don’t know which is which, and taste them with the goal of identifying the odd one out.

Triangle cupping is an excellent tool for building sensory skills. You can start simple: identify the one Kenyan out of a flight that consists of that cup plus two cups of Colombian. And as your skills progress you can make finding the odd one out increasingly difficult: try identifying the odd Sulawesi in a field rounded out by Sumatrans; or the Kona peaberry in a triangle of coffees where the others are estate-run beans from the same farm. It’s surprising just how much you can boost your sensory ability with practice.

Triangle cupping is also an excellent diagnostic for folks who roast coffee. Want to figure out which roast level brings out the very best in a given bean? Cup a triangle of two samples roasted at Agtron 47, and one at Agtron 46. Repeat at Agtron 45, 44, 43… Want to see if you’re maintaining the taste profile for your blend? Cup a triangle of Monday’s roast compared to Wednesday’s. A single cupping session may not tell you all you need to know… but cupped again and again, sooner or later the statistical weight of your choices will become clear.

Triangle cupping is not a particularly good technique, however, for really assessing — much less appreciating — the qualities of a singular cup of coffee. That’s understandable enough. The object of the exercise is, after all, to distinguish what’s different… not necessarily to celebrate what a given cup brings to the table. When you’re wholly focused on the effort of distinguishing the odd cup out, you’re likely to miss some of that cup’s more nuanced qualities.

Neither, as it happens, is tasting a cup all by itself an ideal method. This isn’t news to anyone who frequents a cupping table. Professional cuppers — on receiving a new bean from, say, Costa Rica — will by force of habit reach for the Costa Rican bean already on their shelves to use as a reference point, much as a pianist will seek out middle C. Unless you’re a bona fide super taster – the likes of Green Mountain’s Lindsey Bolger or The Roasterie’s Danny O’Neill, both coffee pros who are blessed with the sensory equivalent of perfect pitch — you’ll use a known quantity to delineate the scale for your tasting. As a result, your cupping notes tend to look… well, scalar. All of a sudden bean X is reduced to being merely more or less of a given sensory quality than the known value of bean Y.

Tasting Two by Two

Of late, I’ve stumbled upon a method that’s both accentuated and accelerated my appreciation and understanding of coffee’s innumerable sensory qualities. I won’t kid myself into thinking this is an original invention — I expect I’ve simply rediscovered a method that’s simply not much talked about — and that is tasting coffees in dissimilar pairs.

Take, for example, the two coffees on the desk in front of me; coffees which really couldn’t be less alike. I’ve already sampled them individually… and then we’ll try them together.

First, from Raven’s Brew Coffee in Alaska — Cherry Karma — an altogether intriguing bean with a curious pedigree. Grown on Balanoor Estate in India, it’s a dry process coffee from a land that, as a rule doesn’t do dry processing. Wet-processing, yes. Monsooned coffee, even. But dry-processed? In India, it simply isn’t done. At first blush, Cherry Karma offers an aromatic whiff of cardamom, with a slightly musty understory. Its flavor is marked by vanilla and faint notes of worn leather; its body is supple and its finish — while very dry — is subtly perfumed with a return of the same exotic spice.

Next to it, another cup with an intriguing story, Green Mountain’s Special Reserve Rwanda Karaba Bourbon. This cup is comprised of all bourbon varietal beans, and more, from only those beans picked during the eleven day period that marked the very peak of the picking season. Its aromas feature cocoa and caramel with a hint of coffee blossom; its flavors offer hints of dark fruit and dark, raw sugar. This is a fairly big-bodied coffee, and its finish resonates rather sweetly.

Sampled side by side, interesting things happen…

Cherry Karma retains its exotic notes of spice, and its subtle dryness assumes a distinct — though not at all unpleasant — distilled quality. The mustiness in its aroma is revealed in its flavor as a mineral quality… a dusty limestone. This is, perhaps, the flavor of a Monsooned Malabar at its finest… without a trace of the Malabar’s notorious numbing fuzziness. It’s focused, tight and dry.

By way of contrast, the Karaba Bourbon has become extravagantly sweet — extraordinarily honeyed both in its flavor and in its rather elegant finish. There’s a slight note of ferment that, borne by the sweet cup, takes on hues of wild honey wine. Even compared to the dry-processed Indian coffee, the wet-processed Rwandan is exceptionally round in body, and syrupy in its finish.

It’s worth noting that cupping these coffees side-by-side hasn’t introduced new flavors or aromas that weren’t present in some form when cupped individually. Instead, cupping these dissimilar pairs side-by-side has thrown the sensory qualities of these coffees into high relief; magnifying the qualities of each so that they can be examined in still greater detail and appreciated all the more for it.

Dissimilar pairs… give it a try, and see what you discover.

Posted on May 23, 2005 - by deCadmus

Cupping Coffee with the Pros

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear… I am not a coffee pro. I’m an enthusiast, certainly. An aficionado, even. But a coffee professional? Nope. Not me.

I am not a globe-trotting buyer of green coffee. I’ve made exactly one trip to origin, to visit several coffee producing farms in Guatemala. (As it happened, I actually visited two coffee-producing countries on that trip, but landing in El Salvador was entirely unplanned… And, for the record, not my fault.) I have never placed a contract for greens, and I have never known the heartache of having to tell a coffee grower, “Sorry, this coffee is good, but not good enough.” I don’t know that I could.

I have the great good fortune to work with people who are coffee pros… Some of the very best in the specialty coffee trade. I also have the remarkably good luck to be able to spend some time with these folks on the roasting floor, and in the cupping room, and I soak up as much information as I can ’cause these folks have likely forgotten more about coffee than I have yet learned.

This all goes to explain why, when I was invited last week to cup a number of coffees with the coffee team I was of two minds. The first of these — my eager to learn and enthusiastic for all things coffee self — leapt to the occasion and said, “Great!” and, “Sure! and, “Love to!” The second — my more introspective and aware of my limitations self — quietly murmured epithets at that eager so-and-so who seemed to be in control of my vocal cords.

This second self had already taken in the scene: the large, round cupping tables are laid out and ready. There are seven lots of coffee arrayed on the circumference of the tables. For each lot there are 10 open bowls of ground coffee. My eager self was just getting around to the math: 7 lots, ten samples each… 70 cups of coffee.

I am by now very familiar with the formal cupping protocol. The madly skilled Barry Jarrett schooled me on the essentials of cupping early in my obsession with the bean [I wouldn't blame you if you clicked away right now to buy a pound or three of his coffee... just bookmark this page first] and I’ve whiled away many happy hours at my kitchen counter exploring the many and delightfully varied attributes of coffee from diverse origins. I’ve lined up as many as five or six coffees, singly, or in pairs or triangles, making for a total of maybe eighteen cups. But seventy cups?

The mechanics of cupping are another matter of concern. That single, sharp, explosive aspiration of coffee from the storied silver cupping spoon… well, quite frequently I aspirate the coffee all the way into my windpipe. Still. After years of practice and how-to tips from expert cuppers. It’s one thing to splutter and cough over inexpert aspiration in your own kitchen [to giggles from herself and amused chuffs from the neurotic golden retriever.] It’s another to demonstrate your lamentable technique in the cupping room. Seventy cups is opportunity enough to make me the first man known to drown in coffee… While standing.

At the root of it all, though — what my introspective self is really muttering about — is this: what if I get it wrong? What if my sensory evaluation deviates substantially from these folks who cup coffee every day? What if, in the course of cupping seventy cups of coffee I simply wear out my ability to discern anything? I grab a silver spoon and tell Mr. Introspective to shut the hell up.

Each bowl holds a measured sample of coffee, each sample ground individually, so that a defective bean might contaminate only a single bowl. Each set of samples, or flight, is labeled with only a sample number, and its origin: Colombia, Mexico, Honduras (there’ve been some quite good coffees from Honduras of late… it’s about time!) Score-sheets are likewise labeled with sample numbers and origins, only. The origin disclosure here can be quite important, as it’s all well and good for a coffee from Sumatra to be loamy and earthy; the same flavors from a Central would be quite another matter.

I’m not told what we’re cupping for — quality control of production roasts, perhaps, or evaluating pre-ship or post-ship samples from contracts — that could bias the results. Just the same, it’s clear from the very light level of roast, these are not production samples; this is all about the greens. And so it begins…

First, evaluating fragrance. Here’s where that spinning cupping table comes into play… Take a deep — deep! — whiff of the dry grounds in the bowl. Got that first sample in your head? Now, slowly spin the table and take in the fragrance of the other samples in the flight. You’re looking for anything different than what was in that first bowl. If you find something, it may be a defect, and certainly it’s a notable inconsistency from sample to sample… Not a good sign (unless it’s from an origin where inconsistencies are part of the game: Sumatra and Yemen come to mind.)

Next, aroma. The cups are filled to the very brim with water just off the boil, and the coffee grounds float to the top, capping each bowl. This is an opportunity to again spin that table and sniff for inconsistencies. A better opportunity presents itself in a few minutes, as you break the crust… using your spoon to push aside that cap of coffee to get the strongest sense of the coffee’s aroma. What’s in that aroma? Spice? Sweetness? Fruit? Flowers? Give the bowl a quick swish to settle the grounds, rinse your spoon in hot water and move on to the next bowl…

As the coffee cools, this is a good opportunity to reflect a bit on the cups, make a few notes, spoon off any remaining grounds, and — in my case — to mentally prepare to make a fool of myself.

Sudden loss of tire pressure. That’s the warning they have on those gates in the airport parking lot… Go the wrong way, run over the hollow spikes with your tires and SPFFT! If you can imagine the sound your tires would make as they suddenly, explosively expel all of their air through a slender tube, then you have a pretty good grasp of the sounds of cupping. ‘Cept this isn’t sudden exhalation… it’s inhaling. The idea is to spray tiny droplets of coffee all over the tongue and soft palate and into the nasal passages all at once, so that all of the tools of taste and smell are brought to bear at a single moment.

This is retribution for all the times my mother told me not to slurp my soup… Spoon some coffee from the bowl, and SPFFT! (Splutter, cough.) Now, what flavors are there? Is it a zippy, acidy cup? How’s the coffee’s body — the sensation between the tongue and the roof of the mouth — weighty? Oily? How’s its finish? Is there a lingering taste? Is it good? Make notes. Rinse spoon. Next bowl… there’s 69 to go. 68… 67…

In the end, I survived. I didn’t make a complete fool of myself, either by spluttering, or by scoring something curiously. Mind you, my tastes are not calibrated to the professionals on the coffee team… These folks are so finely attuned that over the course of a month their cumulative scores for all of the coffees they’ve tasted will deviate by only one or two points. However, while my scoring varied from the pros, the variance was itself consistent. On the whole, you could add five or six points to each of my ratings, and you’d arrive at the numbers the rest of the tasters scored. What they panned, I panned more harshly. What I liked, they liked still more.

Nope… I’m still not a coffee pro. But there’s hope for me yet.

Posted on May 4, 2005 - by deCadmus

From Tasting, To Taste

While your trusty author is caught up in the net of another conference, here’s one from the archives… This first appeared on Bloggle February 7, 2002.

In a recent article on tasting coffee I suggested a ritual that’s both more appealing and less compulsory than the traditional “cupping” form. It’s sparked a number of conversations on the sense of taste — ranging from what flavors we might discern, how we describe them, and, in particular, how we compare them to other flavors — flavors have nothing to do with coffee, or with what we’d generally consider edible things.

You’re no doubt aware that taste and smell are inexorably twined — to taste fully you must be able to smell what you’re tasting. Want to test the idea? Pinch your nose while you’re eating your next meal… you’ll not only experience how tasteless the food becomes, you will also become very aware of the texture of the food. [Interesting how the mind works, isn't it?] Not only is smell bound up in the tasting experience, it contributes to our taste memory. Let’s try another exercise…

Take a deep breath. Release it. Now recall the smell of Scotch tape… it might be jumbled up with other smells of birthdays and Christmas and other gift-giving events. Maybe the memory of the smell is lurking near other school supplies…. Got it? Good. Now… how does it taste? Even if you’ve never had it in your mouth, your sense of smell is talking to your tongue and describing it quite well.

Let’s try some more… Freshly sharpened pencils. Magic markers. Elmer’s glue. Fresh-mowed grass. These are all things that you might have never tasted — never licked, chewed or swallowed — yet still you know their tastes intimately. and consequently, you’re familiar with the tastes of wood and gum rubber, graphite, isopropyl alcohol, and grass. [Green grass, just-mowed on a Summer's day.... I imagine you can even smell the gasoline from the lawnmower.]

So what about things other than food that you have tasted? Dirt? Pebbles? A copper penny? A paper clip? A rubber eraser? Even if you weren’t one of those kids that smelled and often tasted everything he touched —like me— you probably got a mouthful of flavors from unexpected places.

Posted on February 7, 2002 - by deCadmus

From Tasting, to Taste

From tasting, to taste…
In a recent article on tasting coffee I suggested a ritual that’s both more appealing and less compulsory than the traditional “cupping” form. It’s sparked a number of conversations on the sense of taste — ranging from what flavors we might discern, how we describe them, and, in particular, how we compare them to other flavors — flavors have nothing to do with coffee, or with what we’d generally consider edible things.

You’re no doubt aware that taste and smell are inexorably twined — to taste fully you must be able to smell what you’re tasting. Want to test the idea? Pinch your nose while you’re eating your next meal… you’ll not only experience how tasteless the food becomes, you will also become very aware of the texture of the food. [Interesting how the mind works, isn't it?] Not only is smell bound up in the tasting experience, it contributes to our taste memory. Let’s try another exercise…

Take a deep breath. Release it. Now recall the smell of Scotch tape… it might be jumbled up with other smells of birthdays and Christmas and other gift-giving events. Maybe the memory of the smell is lurking near other school supplies…. Got it? Good. Now… how does it taste? Even if you’ve never had it in your mouth, your sense of smell is talking to your tongue and describing it quite well.

Let’s try some more… Freshly sharpened pencils. Magic markers. Elmer’s glue. Fresh-mowed grass. These are all things that you might have never tasted — never licked, chewed or swallowed — yet still you know their tastes intimately. and consequently, you’re familiar with the tastes of wood and gum rubber, graphite, isopropyl alcohol, and grass. [Green grass, just-mowed on a Summer's day.... I imagine you can even smell the gasoline from the lawnmower.]

So what about things other than food that you have tasted? Dirt? Pebbles? A copper penny? A paper clip? A rubber eraser? Even if you weren’t one of those kids that smelled and often tasted everything he touched [like me] — you probably got a mouthful of flavors from unexpected places.

Posted on January 23, 2002 - by deCadmus

A Visit to Riley’s Coffee

What you notice first is how quiet it is. At 400 plus pounds of iron and brass, chrome and enameled steel, it’s quieter in operation than any of the tiny air-roasters I own.

I’m at Riley’s Coffee in Fairview Heights, Il, in the company of Barry Jarrett, the shop’s owner, roaster and torch-bearer of good beans. To the good folk of Fairview, Riley’s is a coffee shop in a busy corner of St. Clair Square — a convenient stop between Dillard’s and J.C. Penney’s department stores. To the single-minded folk of alt.coffee I am at Mecca — maybe not a singular center of compulsive pilgrimage — but certainly a focal point of devotion… Barry’s coffee is just that good.

And here I am, my hands on the controls of Barry’s Diedrich IL-7 coffee roaster. It’s a one-off… an early production model, maybe even pre-production. Call Diedrich and they’ll tell you there’s no such thing. It’s a gas-fueled, infrared-powered seven kilo roaster with its control group mounted on the left-hand side. Thus, the “L”. Of course, left-hand or right-hand has little bearing on me… I’m in a coffee-roasting happy place.

As Barry steps through the controls of the machine, two things become clear. The first is that this is a very clever piece of engineering: a single blower performs triple duty of drum convection, chaff collection and cooling. The drum itself is open-ended — at both ends — allowing not only a front-mounted sight-glass and tryer [a little piston-like scoop that's used to snag beans from the drum for closer inspection] but also making it possible to mount an array of gadgets on the back of the roasting drum, which is precisely what Barry has done. He’s augmented the built-in environmental temperature gauge with a digital probe that captures the temperature of the beans themselves… and records this “bean mass” temperature at 10-second intervals to a portable data logger.

Now, put the clever engineering and nifty bolt-ons aside, and something else becomes clear. Beyond the engineering — maybe even in spite of it — roasting coffee in Barry’s shop is very much a hands-on affair. Measuring, loading, listening… [it's a while to first crack] and then shifting the blower like a formula-one car, listening… [it's not so far to second] and shifting again, working the tryer, listening, sniffing, eyeing the beans, letting them sputter and crack until NOW! and dumping the beans to the cooling bin, shifting the blower one last time while the beans hiss and crackle and smoke, twirling in the bin, mahogany-brown and gleaming.

The gadgets, it turns out, are guides, only. And ultimately they say less about how you’re doing, and more about how you’ve done, and then only when you take the time to review the roast profile… studying the plot while you’re cupping a sample from that very roast. This is cupping for performance — think of the director watching dailies, or the coach studying tapes of last Sunday’s game — tasting this batch against the one before, and the hundreds before that, searching for nuances of flavor and aroma, body and finish. This is artisan’s work.

Barry would scoff, I think, if I called him a master roaster — a term that’s been so over-used in the coffee business it’s as much a pejorative. Instead, I’ll suggest simply that Barry is a craftsman — especially skilled, and always seeking to better his craft — the almost elemental melding of fire, steel… and curious beans from faraway places.