Thursday, May 01, 2003


tasting notes

ok, back now to the all-important coffee. one of the great things about the scca convention in boston was the big group taste.

while it's not really possible to taste successfully in a big group, it was still fun to compare notes with the pros. even if the size of the group meant paper cups and fetco air pots.

what's wrong with this setup is that it makes it more difficult to judge the aroma component correctly -- you end up smelling the wax of the cup and get a papery taste. but why complain? why not enjoy?

so with a coffee buyer from peets, we tasted 5 coffees, a thru e. the goal was to guess the origin, as well as to judge overall balance and flavor notes. we judged from 1 (barely detectable) to 5 (prominent) on aroma, acidity, body (thickness or feel in the mouth), and flavor.

due to the paper scene, you just had to give most of the coffees a 2 or 3 on aroma. coffee c's aroma however managed to survive handily: i gave it a 4. so lemme give you the overall rundown: i got 3 of the 5 completely right!

i correctly caught that coffee d was a sumatra, because it just had huge body. syrupy almost, and nice earthy flavor. 5 and 4 respectively for coffee d. also, it had very little acidity (or brightness, that sparkling feeling against the roof of your mouth you also feel on the sides of the tongue toward the back). had to be sumatra.

i drank sumatra in a press pot for years so i would have been ashamed to have missed this one. i also guessed coffee c correctly because i really didn't like it. not at all. it was too bright, like drinking strong, slightly sour citrus juice. 5 on acidity from me.

and it frankly had a grapefruit aftertaste. but it didn't leave your mouth feeling dry -- rather, it left you salivating a little, which is what coffee experts call "juicy." the body was just thin, almost like plain water. to my mind, these are all the hallmarks of an african coffee, usually a kenyan. i just can't get into these coffees.

so i id'd one because i liked it and the other because i didn't. then came coffee e. this was also a fairly bright coffee, with an vaguely nutmeg or spicy aroma that survived the paper cup a little.

it tasted like light molasses -- a heavy brown sugar-y type taste -- and on the back of the tongue it came through like a shot -- blueberries. to me, blueberries = ethiopian harrar. so i was immediately suspicious that it was harrar, and again i was correct.

back to coffee a. it was a mild coffee, no doubt. it had medium-to-light body, medium maybe nutty and apple cider flavor, medium brightness. nothing was wrong with it. it was complex, nicely balanced and most people would have loved it.

i recognized it was good. but for some reason it didn't make my soul sing. nothing stood out.

i like coffee to be like perfume -- to have something idiosyncratic about it, something almost inexplicable, something that settles into your soul and sticks to you. actually, that's how i feel about people too. . .there has to be an indefinable unique spirit. . . maybe even a flaw.

this reminds me of what an old teacher of mine, poet charles greenleaf bell once said: "we love people for their faults, not despite them."

i guessed it was a central american but i had no idea from where. the answer: costa rica. actually this was apparently a prize-winning coffee!

this left me with coffee b, which frankly had me a bit stumped. it had a medium body, slightly strong citrus flavor, low acidity. hmmm -- a citrus flavor might send me back to africa, but the lack of acidity confused me. i gave up. and it turned out to be a fair-trade organic coffee from nicaragua.

live and learn, which is what i long to do. . .if you thought i was passionate about coffee before the convention, fuggedaboudit. i'm so much more into coffee now that i think i'm beginning to frighten the horses. . .it's all i've been thinking about for days. . .

but i will also note that drinking so much espresso had made me forget a bit about the joys of the special single origin coffee. i was glad to be reminded of those; they're important.

you have to remember to appreciate them. it's not always about rockin' out to the intensity of espresso, like listening to nothing but p.j. harvey. sometimes it has to be about lovely thunder. . .

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