Daniel's Coffee Blog

Coffee Erotica

I've been compiling all the cupping data from the final round of March's Ethiopia Limited competition in Addis Ababa. This involves going through the score sheets of specific judges one by one and recording any notes they made on each individual coffee. Then we pass along this information to bidders so they have a little more cupping data beyond the raw scores.

Sounded like dull work when I started it, but it's turned out to be a lot of fun. Reading back through these score sheets, it's remarkable how distinct my memories of these coffees are. I'm just getting over a cold, too, and my inability to taste or smell anything in my immediate environment is probably contributing to my crystal clear recollections of the aromatics from three months ago.

If you've ever seen one of these auction offerings sheets, you may have been (as I remember being) a bit confused by the proliferation of descriptors. Some get repeated over and over. For instance, "sweet," is on just about every sheet. Well, for coffees that are scoring in the high 80's and 90's, I should hope so! Then you have your outliers that only one person noted (I will proudly own up to the mentions of "pineapple" you will see on this year's auction sheet).

Reading these is like reading coffee erotica. As distinct from espresso porn, which is an entirely visual arousal. This is the literary version.

Here's the entry for a typical sun-dried natural coffee, the #9-ranked Sidamo from Adam Bedane: berries, ripe cherries, sweet, vanilla, fresh butter, dark chocolate, oranges, tangerine, great snap, finishes smooth, citrus, sweet and fat

I leave off all the negative comments. They are few and far between, but they do pop up from time to time... with the washed coffees it's usually a hint of astringency or "youth" in the coffee; with the naturals it's usually a hesitant question about uniformity. Suffice to say these are outlier remarks too: if more than one judge detected something like this, the coffee wouldn't have scored high enough to make the finals.

I also, regrettably, must leave off most of the truly creative descriptors. So my note of "astonishing!!!" for the natural Korate from SMS is not on the list. Nor is Tracy Allen's note of "preacher's daughter," on Yitbarek Tilahun's washed coffee from Aleta Wondo.

So , while sloppiness in descriptors can make me cranky, let the court record show that I admit it's impossible not to find joy in things like the flavor of mango in a coffee. For the truly dorky, I'm transcribing every single descriptor from this list after the jump.

Misty Valley

Right now I am drinking a cup of Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley that one of our students brought from her roastery in South Korea. The class is over, but the coffee remains. When the class cupped it blind yesterday, it was the clear favorite.

The students have gone home and the lab is quiet. It's a sunny morning in Northern California, and I am sitting here in amid all these beautiful coffee roasters, sending a few phone calls to Ethiopia to try and secure a lot of coffee. All of a sudden I realized I was peckish for some actual brew. So, going through the sampling left over from the course, I was so happy to see the Misty Valley still there. I brewed it up in the Bunn (sneer not, specialty geeks... this thing is calibrated like a jet engine: clean perfect cups every time).

I had to leave the lab for a moment to go outside. When I came back in, the whole room smelled like lavender and jasmine and strawberries... just from one little pot of Misty Valley. What a precious little bean. My cup is light and crisp and so sweet, and of course fragrant.

What's really astonishing about this kind of coffee is how much of it there could be. Natural processed Yirgacheffes (like this one) are becoming more common. But to process them right and have them held out as separate lots and get them to an exporter who knows their value and get them on the ship into the ports cleanly and market them to roasters who will value them right and roast them right... so many chances to drop the treasure. People like Abdella Bagersh who make this all happen are heroes.

It's funny that the best coffee I have had this week came from Korea. Misty Valley is also the best coffee I had the week Café Grumpy was opening in Chelsea... we featured it for our grand opening. It's great that this amazing bean gets around so well in the little circle of specialty roasters. But this also shows us that more coffees are needed! Misty Valley is not the only one out there... it's just the one that has ended up in everyone's hands.

Mmmm, though... just took another sip. I'm not complaining at all.

Entropy is Not Freedom

(photo by these guys)

Daniel Mulu took the train up from Baltimore (where he is visiting family before his return to Addis Ababa). We missed Andrew Barnett's Brazilian coffee event at Grumpy, which was a major bummer. Daniel got off the train in Jersey instead of Penn Station. I predict I will not stop making fun of him until mid-2015 at the earliest.

But we did manage to make it our own coffee event in time, the next day. It was freaking great! We took the A-train out to Ozone Park where John Moore of Dallis Coffee set us up on their sweet two-barrel Probat sample roaster. We roasted up 12 delicious samples from the Ethiopia auction and then trained it back into town just in time to pick up some cupping supplies from Gimme! and head up to the BODUM headquarters.

Andrew Barnett came, and Oren from Oren's Daily Roast, Genevieve Kappler of international cupping fame (France, US, Ethiopia, Colombia), a delegation from the Ethiopian permanent mission at the UN. Plus Koji from Japan, Matija and Mare from Croatia, and assorted Mannahattoes and Breukleiners...

(thanks Koji, Anne and Neil for the photos... and Anne and Neil I swear I am getting a new camera and will stop stealing your pics).

THANK YOU BODUM.

THANK YOU EDIBLE MANHATTAN.

Much coffee was cupped. The space is beautiful. Afterward, much meat and beer with Anne and Neil and Andrew (what a terrible Buddhist I am), and I took Daniel to SoHo to see the pretty girls and the bright lights.

Perhaps some Cup of Excellence events there in the near future? Raise your hand if you like this idea...

Special Event in New York: May 8th

Tri-state area coffee people are invited to an event at the new BODUM USA headquarters in Manhattan, Thursday, May 8, at 6 pm.

We'll be cupping and pressing some of the top coffees from this years Ethiopia Limited auction. For those of you who wanted to attend the April 10th event but couldn't make it, here's your chance. And for anyone who's going to Minnesota for SCAA, this should leave you enough time to get home, get some sleep, and get back out there and cup with some fellow New Yorkers!

The coffees are outstanding; you have my guarantee on that. Also, this is a chance to rub elbows with some international coffee judges, including Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffé and Daniel Mulu, one of Africa's most famous cuppers.

The event is courtesy of yours truly and ...

BODUM USA

Edible Manhattan and....

Boot Coffee

A special invitation to roasters and green buyers. Space is extremely limited, so please write to me if you want to come... I expect that we will unfortunately have to turn some people away. RSVP here. Hope to see you there!

Ethiopia Cupping Report

Yesterday's cupping at the Cupping Room Tasting Room (maybe they should change the name...) was a blast. We had a great cross-section of people there, including green buyers from coffee roasting companies and importers, cafe owners, baristas, and discerning coffee drinking customers from all over New York City. Matija, a barista from Croatia, came with his girlfriend, Mare. Hannah Wallace came, from the New York Times. And so did photographer Chester Higgins. Chester has done photography in Ethiopia, and he brought prints of a beautiful photo of his of the famous rock-hewn church at Lalibela, which he graciously handed out to our participants.

Also, a little Ethiopian saxaphone music to set the mood. (Off the topic of coffee... the music in Ethiopia was something I was not prepared for. It's almost impossible to describe for me. Here's one of the prettiest songs I have ever heard. Breaks my heart, the title alone...Mulatu Astatqe's "Baby, My Unforgettable Remembrance")

The coffee was outstanding, as expected. Everything was good, of course. But what really stood out for me yesterday was, among the washed coffees, the coffee from Lensemo Lamisso from Aleta Wondo, and among the natural coffees, the Idido from S. A. Bagersh.

I'm getting more and more excited about this auction. I've been excited about these coffees since I tasted them in Addis Ababa, but the auction itself is getting closer and closer... all the work will have been worth it if people bid on these coffees. If you are in any way connected with the coffee industry, make sure you spread the word about this event. (Info here.) If you don't actually work in coffee, but only drink it, ask your favorite roaster or coffee shop if they plan to participate. The coffee is so outstanding, and the proceeds go directly to the farmers, helping them build a better life and further ensuring more quality coffee down the line.

I want to thank everyone who came. I also want to thank Cory Magamoll for helping everything to go so smoothly. Thanks Cory. Birr!! Also, as always, the fantastic folks at the Tasting Room. They get no money or anything for doing these events. They're just dedicated to really wonderful-tasting things. Awesome.

Roast-a-Rama

Ah, look at all that green gold. I've been roasting ALL DAY today. And by roasting, I mean taking green coffee beans and applying heat so as to cause a Maillard reaction, darkening the beans and making them fit for beverage preparation. Got it? Anything anyone else tells you is a filthy, filthy lie.

This is coffee from Ethiopia, over a dozen samples of winners from the Ethiopia Limited auction that I have been going on and on about. We're cupping them tomorrow at the Tasting Room. It's been fun roasting these coffees, but they are such delicate babies, and the quanitities are so small, and the samples so rare, that I am almost afraid to breathe on them wrong. When we cupped these for competition in Addis Ababa, the woman who ran the sample roaster at the Ethiopian Coffee Exporters Association was ready to kill me because I kept making her re-roast samples that were even a tiny bit off-spec (that, and I kept changing the codes we were using so that by the end every single coffee had about 4 different identifying codes that all had to be cross-referenced to figure out which was which, and only I had the sheet).

I've got a couple more hours to go here and then I am done. I'll post about the cupping results tomorrow. I am very interested to see how people's impressions of these compare to what the judges thought. Wish me luck staying sane.