Daniel's World of Coffee

What I've Been Up To

The last time I posted in May, I was in Panama. I'm in Seattle now, and here's a quick run-down on what I've been up to in the coffee world.

1) First of all that Panama trip. As I noted before, I was acting as host for a group of Puerto Rican coffee farmers who were sent to Panama to observe specialty coffee practices in Panama. There were a dozen people in our group, and we spent our time in the western highlands of Chiriqui. I knew it was going to be fun before I left, but it really ended up exceeding my expectations. I'll post some videos and comments about this project over the next few days.

2) Speaking of Puerto Rico, I'm finishing up the analysis of the soil-data project I started way back in November. There's a huge document detailing all of our findings that I've created. I will share part of that this week, and the rest of it when it's all officially available.

3) As always, I'm teaching roasting and cupping courses in California with Boot Coffee. In May and June I was down there with Willem, Jodi, and the rest of the crew for some really great courses. I will be going down there again at the end of July for another 10 days, into August.

4) In the next 12 months I'll be teaching courses in Honduras (twice), Panama, and hopefully Colombia as well. Stay tuned here for more information. Or you can check out the Boot Coffee website.

5) After a long and arduous journey through my own preconceptions, I've become a full-on believer in Kahlua. It's just so much better than every other coffee liqueur I've tasted (and you'd be surprised how many I have tasted.... think double digits). Last September I did some work for Kahlua in Stockholm. In June, this project took me to grand old New York, where the Ost Café folks were as good as good can be to me, despite new babies and new pork sandwich stands springing up left and right. Best cafe in NYC, y'all. In the next few months I'll be doing more work for Kahlua here in the USA. I'm excited to share with you what I've been doing. I'll be sure to mention it here on the blog when it becomes appropriate. Did I mention I get free rum, coffee, and Kahlua?

6) Fresh Cup Magazine published an article I wrote in the June issue, about branching out from the old familiar origins and finding new gems (Nepalese coffee, anyone?). I'll post some snippets here, copyright permitting.

7) Theoretically I have something coming out in Parade Magazine... but I have yet to see it appear and your guess is as good as mine.

7) Somewhere along the line there I was in Houston for the SCAA conference. Somewhere along the line there, Alejandro Mendez from Viva Espresso in San Salvador won the World Barista Championship. Anyone who reads this blog is already well-informed of that stuff. But still... it did happen.

8) All work and no play makes Homer something something...

(PS I am in Seattle currently... oh wait, I already said that).

Roasting at Origin Article

I've got a short article in the March issue of Fresh Cup magazine. It's not available online, but for those of you in the coffee industry, you should be reading Fresh Cup anyway!

It's for the "Roaster's Realm" column, and I wrote about roasting quality coffee at origin. Often you can't get very well-roasted coffee in producing countries. There's some striking irony when you are surrounded by lovely, green, growing coffee trees and drinking a cup of something that's diner quality at best.

But things are changing. I interviewed three quality-oriented roasters I have worked with in three different countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico), and came up with some interesting results. Check it out.

Daniel in the New York Times on "Peak Coffee"

I've been keeping busy teaching in Honduras and San Francisco. And right now I'm in New York doing some consulting work. Which is fitting enough because today I was invited to take part in a forum for the New York Times.

The Times published this interesting article about the possibility that climate change is the driving force behind the record-high price of green coffee right now.

The Times also runs a neat feature called "Room for Debate" to encourage discussion on their website. The editor of that feature asked me to weigh in on the notion of "peak coffee."

You can find the main page for the debate here, and my own take here. Enjoy!

Ethiopia Guide

I've been composing a rather long guide to buying coffee in Ethiopia. There are still a few more drafts to go through, but I thought it would be nice to post some of the information here on the blog.

The completed guide will be online eventually, and I'll be sure to post the URL when it becomes available. Some of it is quite technical stuff, but for now, here's a little 101 stuff by way of introduction...

Coffee Characteristics

The most important thing to remember about Ethiopian coffee is that Ethiopia is the Motherland of all arabica coffee. In a certain sense, all arabica coffee is Ethiopian, whether it is grown in Latin America or Indonesia or on a hillside in Sidama.

When coffee was taken to other countries, people had to find ways to adapt it to the local climate. You find that arabica coffee grows best — worldwide — in places that have climates similar to that of Ethiopia: mountainous, tropical, with moderate wet and dry seasons.

Generally, in Ethiopia, no such adaptation is necessary! The coffee has been growing there for literally thousands of years, in the forests of southeastern Ethiopia. It is already perfectly adapted to the climate. This is the immense advantage that Ethiopia has over all other coffee producing countries.

As the “origin of all origins,” Ethiopia has another unique feature: hundreds of heirloom varietals. In many cases, farmers grow their own unique heirloom varietals. The majority of these varietals grow nowhere else in the world, and a great many of them have not even been classified.

In many places — often in Sidama and in Harar, for example — many smallholder farms will pool their coffees at a small local milling station, each contributing his own special coffee. The result is a complex melange of unique flavors, the truest expression of local terroir to be found anywhere on the planet. The rich complexity in a cup of Yirgacheffe, for example, is largely a product of this special combination that occurs nowhere else in the world.

It is difficult to make generalizations about the flavor of Ethiopian coffee, for all the reasons stated above. Furthermore, each coffee growing region is home to unique flavors. These are explained in greater detail in this guide, under the subheadings of each region in Part Two.

If one had to make some broad generalizations about Ethiopian coffee — keeping in mind that there are many exceptions to the rule — one can say the following. Ethiopian coffees tend to be grown at middle-high to very-high altitudes. The result is generally a hard-bean type, with intense flavors and aromatics. Fruit flavors are common in all regions, though the specific fruit character varies from region to region. Berry aromatics are relatively common, as well as citrus and chocolate. Ethiopian coffees can be full-bodied (natural Grade 4 Limu, for instance) or light in body (washed Grade 1 Yirgacheffe, for instance), but in either case the mouthfeel of top quality Ethiopian coffees is generally smooth and pleasing.

Ethiopia grows and exports only arabica coffee, not robusta.

Article on Varietals in Fresh Cup

There's a nice article on coffee varietals in the new issue of Fresh Cup, including quotes from George Howell and yours truly! Check it out in print, or read it online here. The article begins on page 62, and it's written by Dan Leif.

Here's a nice quote to give you an idea:

GEISHA: Unless you and your Probat have been holed up in a cave recently, you've heard about this varietal, which has become the toast of Panama's coffee scene. But what does it actually taste like when roasted correctly? Howell answers without hesitation: "Sweet lemon apricot. It's very intense." Humphries is more metaphorical. "It's got a very sweet character, but it's very citrusy," he says. "I always think about fresh-squeezed orange juice from oranges right of the tree, when they're still warm. And it will smell like jasmine or fresh lilies. It's extraordinary."

$12 cup of coffee now for sale at New York cafes - NYPOST.com

"It is a higher-end coffee, and you have to take a lot of time developing and processing it," said Holt. "Once the coffee is harvested, it is dried on a raised African drying bed -- the actual coffee cherries never sit on the ground."

via www.nypost.com

New York Post covers my old friends at Café Grumpy.

First comment on their website after this post went up? "I can buy 2 32 oz. cans of Folgers for that and get a much better cup of coffee."

Let's see that's one TRUE, and one FALSE.

I'm only disppointed we didn't get any of the Post's trademark rhyming, punning headlines. But I guess we always have the Sprudge Report for that.

Eating Coffee Beans in Business Week

A couple weeks back in Brooklyn, I sat down with journalist Benjamin Wallace to eat some coffee beans. He wrote an article for Business Week about "alternative" ways to get your coffee fix, including a cool new coffee-inhaler type device that I got to try. You can read the article here.

Benjamin Wallace was also the writer who, when working on a story for GQ, tasted kopi luwak with me. Here's Ben giving an interesting talk at the TED conference, based on the article he wrote and the research he did for it.

Language and the Brain

On the first day of one of my cupping classes in Harar, I asked the group what they thought was the #1 word Americans use when describing the flavor they desire in Harar coffees. Three people called out, "Blueberry!"

"How many of you have ever tasted a blueberry?" I asked.

Out of sixteen people present, only one hand up, from an exporter who used to live in the United States. So we tasted some blueberries. Later, a few people told me that was the most important moment of the whole class for them.

Whether we have a sense experience of something often determines if we have a word for it. But the opposite is true. Whether we have a word for something often determines if we are even capable of discerning it.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names-not English's light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian's goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that's a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for "in" when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

That's from an article in Newsweek, What's in a Word?

Food for thought for anyone attempting to describe the flavor of a coffee.

Top 20 Coffees of All Time: The Magenta Orgasm

Talking about my "top twenty coffees of all time" yesterday got me thinking about what, seriously, would be on that list. So I am going to revisit some of those memorable coffees over the coming weeks when the mood strikes me.

The following article appeared on my old, old blog (the LiveJournal one), and my readership has changed quite a bit since then, so I thought it would be fun to repost this. I originally wrote it for the women's website Divine Caroline, so those of you who are coffee experts can forgive the elementary presentation. But I still stand by the general philosophy of this piece. Enjoy!

Papayas, Love Poems, and Magenta Orgasms

COFFEES THAT ARE TRULY ONE OF A KIND

by Daniel Humphries

I’ve got my score sheet right here in front of me. It says, and I am not making this up: “banana, papaya, pineapple, raspberry, mangos... tropical...” (then you can see I am getting a little excited, because my handwriting is more hurried) “so sweet and smooth... astonishing” (then I lose my professionalism altogether): “Velvety pinks and magentas!!”

Would you guess that I was describing coffee? Yeah, me neither. But this is the sort of thing I sometimes come across in my travels: a truly unique coffee. For the skeptical here’s a statistic: brewed coffee typically contains over 800 different organic compounds, compared with around 200 in a glass of wine. Each compound has unique flavor, from the nasty (ashes, mold, animal hide) to the divine (meyer lemon, honey, baker’s chocolate). What marks a great coffee is an intriguing combination of positive attriubtes and a lack of negative ones.

It was in Ethiopia that I found the coffee that caused my little “pink and magenta” orgasm, in the middle of scoring coffees for a national competition. Now, strictly speaking, “velvety pinks and magentas!” is not a technically acceptable term. You might be surprised at the level of detail that goes into scoring these coffees. Coffees are evaluated on flavor, aftertaste, acidity (not always a bad thing!), body, cleanliness (really!), balance, sweetness, fragrance and aroma (not technically the same thing!), and well, you get the idea. If you are interested in what a scoresheet looks like (and if you are interested, my goodness dear, what kind of hopeless nerd are you?!) you can see one version (though not the one I was using) here.

The aroma notes I listed above (papaya, mango) are the kinds of notes professional cuppers will often make on their score sheets, though admittedly those particular notes are quite rare. Writing down colors is less common. It’s supposed to be scientific, after all. Sometimes I have to remind myself. Otherwise I might end up with drawings of race cars for, say, a kick-ass Blue Batak Sumatra; a series of angrily sketched frowny faces for defective commercial coffee from — name redacted to protect the purveyors of defective commercial coffee — ; and Keatsian odes to delicate Guatemalan beauties (“O, thou still unravished Huehuetenango of quietness...”)

Usually, though, I just stick to my numerical scores. I swear. Besides, giving a coffee a 9.5 on aftertase is about the same as writing a love poem to it, considering what that implies about the quality of the coffee.

All this is just to find coffees that people are going to like. Generally we don’t speak of people evaluating their double americanos based on balance and fragrance. But there’s the catch: they are evaluating it that way. They just don’t know it. People know what they like, they just sometimes lack the vocabulary to explain it.

And what do people like? Above all, they like sweetness and a smooth mouthfeel. Market research backs this up. Also: duh. This is why people put cream and sugar (or soy and splenda, natch) in their coffee. People also like a good aftertaste, a pleasing snap (“good” acidity), and an interesting or comforting aroma profile. The fact that they don’t break it down that way doesn’t mean that it can’t be broken down that way.

A truly great coffee will be so sweet and smooth as to not need any cream or sugar or Stevia. (Actually, nothing should ever need Stevia, ever. For any reason. Have you tried that stuff? I don't care if it's "all natural"," it’s like putting the purified essence of the sun on your tongue, if the sun was made out of sugar and post-industrial chemical waste). A truly great coffee will also have something unique about it that no other coffee has, no matter how sweet and smooth.

And this is why we go through all the trouble to taste and score coffee after coffee in the kinds of competitions I’m describing. Trust me, a lot of the coffee is terrible. There are all kinds of defects that can come up on the table. I don’t need to tell you this. You have already had terrible coffee many times. But the search is always worth it. When you find that glittering ruby on the table, you are such a happy little taster.

Lucky for you, dear and beautiful reader, it’s not necessary to go to Ethiopia to find these coffees. Just be discerning. In fact, be a snob. I highly recommend it. If you want to find a coffee like the one that made me start singing arias in Ethiopia, look for coffee that was bought and roasted in small lots or “micro-lots.” Coffee bought at specialty auction is reliably outstanding. Look for “Cup of Excellence” (top coffees from all over Latin America and now Rwanda), “Best of Panama” (top coffees from, um, Panama), “Ethiopia Limited” (where I found my little gem) and the like.

If your favorite roaster or coffee shop doesn’t offer something like this, ask them why not? And as always, let your own taste be your guide. If it makes you want to draw unicorns, it’s good coffee.

(Magenta Square by Nigel Tomm)

The Chic Set, the Beautiful People

Hello from El Salvador. It's going to be 99 degrees this week, or so say the meteor-men. I've been down here two of the last three weeks, and very busy in the New York interim doing trainings and various high-glamor emailing and bean-counting.

I'm helping to lead a tour for micro-roasters down here. Over the next four days we'll be visiting farms, mills and co-ops, cupping coffee and picking cherries. The crop came in a little late this year because of funky rains in July and August, so there's still a lot of picking going on in the highlands. Looks like about an average crop, both quality-wise and quantity-wise. I'll know more after this week's cuppings.

Check out this article in the NY Times about Steve Mierisch and David Latourell of Intelligentsia, and how they shop for gear for the slick Intelly SoHo training space, titled, oddly enough, Shopping with David Latourell and Steve Mierisch.

Oh, to be one of the fur-hat wearing few.