A short video clip from last Saturday.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
Ugh! It’s not the quantity of coffee samples you cup each day … sometimes it’s all about the way you cup them. When coffee is really good, it demands your full concentration. I started this morning at 9 AM, but by 4 PM (with no breakfast or lunch, just some fruit and bread between rounds) I am flat out finished. In the early cuppings, I noticed the bowls were about half empty by the time the 4 cuppers were finished (Francisco Mena, the exporter with Exclusive Coffees; Tim O’Brien of Cafetin San Martin, one of the best farmer groups here, Myself, and Mary of Electric City coffee, from the hometown of Michael Scott). Anyway, by the time the last round came around, the bowls look barely touched. Everyone was “conserving their slurps”. I have cupped way more samples than this in a day, but not with the intensity we all brought to this cupping. It’s such a physical feat, and somewhat exploitative to use your palate this way. It becomes like a tool, like a hammer you are pounding all day until your wrist is sore. But the coffees this season are so good from Costa Rica, well, the boutique little micro-lots specifically. The crop volume is down, but some of these coffees are just spectacular. It could be the cumulative affect, but I think I scored more cups over 90 day than any I can remember. To keep it real, I will take green samples home and recup them in the comfort of my own lab, to make sure I wasn’t suffering from traveler’s euphoria (or caffeine-induced exuberance). On the flip side, it is great to be excited about CR again. To put it in perspective, this is an origin that had industrialized it’s production, all coffees sold under generic mill marks, so much land planted in the awful super-productive Costa Rica 95 Catimor cultivar, that I had given up hope a few years ago. Anyway, be prepared for us to through a bazilion amazing Costa Rica micro-lots at you again this year, my apologies in advance.
Helsar Del Zarcero Micro Mill:
I am off for an action-packed pre-ship cupping trip of Central America - Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua in 7 days. Whew. Mostly, this is to select micro lots and cup coffees that are nearly ready to ship. It will be a lot of cuppings with farmers we already work with and coffee “projects” we set up before the season. One thing I can note here, we are going to cut back a bit on the dry-process Centrals this year. That was “so last season” as the kids say. We’ll have them for sure, just not to the degree of 2008. It was fun to have that little dance with the devil, to cross the line into bright, clean, fruity, unconventional coffees, but I think we need to put the DP Central thing into it’s correct place. We look to these countries for their beautiful, clean, bright wet-process coffees, not to compete with Harar and Yemen.
Unless I can get some internet on the road, I leave you with this youtube gem, a student video from Syracuse U. reimagining coffee cupping as a kind of “Woody Allen in Sleeper/2001 A Space Odyssey” quality assurance lab flight-of-fantasy. It’s a hoot:
… and check out the “video responses, hee-hee”
I had some interesting footage of the Kenya auction, and the amazing sampling room upstairs. Yes, those auction sound effects are real! I did not dub in sound from a ’70s PONG video game! -Tom
This is a monologue, quick and easy video done with a flip camera, showing coffee cherry fresh from the tree, and then discussing the resulting processing options; dry-process, pulp natural, wet-process, forced demucilage. It’s not that pretty, but some good information. Sorry the background music interferes a little. I was trying to make it a tad more palatable! -Tom NOTE: tried to fix music, so these embeds are new files!
Part 1
Part 2
I finished (sorta) a long pictorial and commentary compiled from my travel notes in Ethiopia the past few weeks. There’s a few good points in there, and if you have time to kill, check it out.
I’m not finished yet. I keep generating material from this recent Africa trip. I was writing some actual commentary this time about both Ethiopia and Kenya. The later portion is done and I think it’s worth a read, so click here! … no …. here!
coffee. It can be rough to cup mixed tables of coffee in one day, or mixed flights. Having just returned from Kenya, it struck me how efficiently, quickly, almost mechanically they cup coffee there. 223/2 . 323. 233. Body, acidity flavor. The cupper doesn’t even write down their own scores. That would slow things down. But they cup Kenyas all day long, day-in-day-out, 650 per week, 2x per sample, plus 600 Tanzanias, plus re-cups, totaling 2,000 or even 3,000 coffees a week! wow. They have 3 sample roasters, 5 barrels each, running for hours each day. But oddly, they don’t face my challenge. Today, 1 table of Central America pre-ships from the new crop, 1 table of re-cups of the top Kenyas, a table of Brazils, and then 3 different in-depth single coffee cuppings to write reviews. That involves a lot of “gear-changing” and it can be hard. I admit, the Brazil table was dismal. Everything tasted like dusty herbs, with a few weeds thrown in. I will try again tomorrow with those, maybe it was just the context, or maybe they were truly all bad. As a cupper, I think one of the best skills you can develop is skepticism, and suspended judgment. Sure, first impressions count. But they can be awfully wrong too. That’s part of the challenge, and enjoyment as well.
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