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.

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.

• 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.

“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.”

As for things olfactorial, don’t miss the article’s categorical companion piece, Dos and Don’ts for Supercharged Olfactory Skills. But don’t delay… I suspect this content may go away when the next issue of Roast hits the newsstand. (Not that it’s actually on newsstands… that’s me being metaphorical.)

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.

The campaign helped to create a market for single-origin coffee… still it failed to deliver on its promise. Today, Colombian coffee growers have some ground to cover — the very gap that their Federation created between our expectations of Colombian coffee, and our experience. And so, even while the latest incarnation of Juan Valdez smiles his mustachioed smile at us — Colombian coffee farmers are racing to discover the true flavors and identity of their beans, their growing regions and micro-climates. In Colombia, as elsewhere, the Cup of Excellence competition is proving a particularly effective vehicle for discovery.

When you cup the field of winners of the Colombian First Harvest Cup of Excellence and your gut reaction is — okay… so what else ya got? — you just might be a coffee snob.

Colombian coffees — even specialty-grade coffees — are rarely knock-your-socks-off kind of beans. The character of Colombian coffee is often described as “classic”… medium bodied, gently acidic, and mildly fruited. For a coffee snob, those descriptors can spell a code word that doesn’t require Dan Brown to cypher out: m-e-d-i-o-c-r-i-t-y. And to be perfectly candid, there were cups in this year’s field of jury-selected winners that struck me as altogether… mild. Soft flavors, acidity that offered monotoned, mostly-lemon brightness in a cup that, at this level, should offer technicolor.

Make no mistake, this year’s Colombian C.O.E. program offered some exceptional beans, with flavor profiles that ranged far and wide — beans you might mistake for a huge and winey Kenya, or a dusky chocolate Nicaraguan — and with an intensity of flavor and nuanced complexity that such a competition demands. The most remarkable cup of all, however — the cup I bid on at auction, and which Green Mountain now offers as its third Special Reserve selection — is one we very nearly disqualified.

A single bad bean — one that is under-ripe or overripe, one that’s been fermented too long or otherwise mishandled in processing — can ruin an entire pot of coffee. In cupping the Colombian C.O.E. we had five cups of each lot of coffee on the table… and one of the five samples cups for this lot had a flaw. A serious flaw. You could smell it. You could taste it. It was unmistakable, and perhaps unforgivable in competition… except that the four other cups from that particular farm were arguably the most exciting of all the coffees on the table.

In the end — after another round of cupping that proved entirely without flaws — it was learning more about the farmer of this coffee that won us over. Don Alonso Sevilla Zúñiga has grown coffee for more than 60 years. He treats his coffee with respect and patience, and manages his land carefully. So was it something of a risk to put this particular coffee — a coffee that may prove to be a little edgy – on our Special Reserve list? Absolutely. But the rewards immediately reveal themselves in the cup.

Green Mountain’s Special Reserve Colombian — named after Don Alonso’s farm in Pitalito, Dos Quebradas — is an exceptional, and exceptionally balanced coffee. It’s a lovely chestnut-hued bean, roasted just on the full side of City. Just ground it’s intensely fragrant of coffee flower, orange blossoms and sweet cedar, and while it brews it offers grace notes of caramel and green apple. Its body is round, its acidity is crisp and snappy — assured but not overpowering — while its flavors are a rich and complex compote of summer fruits; melon and pear while the cup is very warm, peach and apricot as it cools. Its finish is just as dynamic, as its lingering acidity fairly dances on the tongue.

Kudos to the coffee team at Green Mountain — Lindsey, Patty, Deb, Shannon and Ed — for taking a chance on this remarkable bean… and for sparking my own renewed respect and appreciation for “classic” Colombian coffee.

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.

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.

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.