Daniel's World of Coffee

Daffy Self-Indulgence and the God Shot of Myhrvold

For many years I read every single word of every single issue of Harper's Magazine. This went on for about 8 or 9 years, until Lewis Lapham retired as editor and I gradually lost interest in the magazine, though I still read it from time to time. For so long I held it in my mind as the epitome of literary and journalistic excellence that even though my ardor has somewhat faded, the name of that august publication still reverberates with deep meaning for me.

How happy then to get an email from an old friend with whom I shared this love (we often traded long-form opinions on this or that Harper's article via snail mail), pointing me to the July 2011 issue where there is a mention of me in a throwaway line at the bottom of page 82.

Amusingly, it's for something that I did, well, many years ago when I still read Harper's religiously. At Coffee Fest in Seattle in the mid-2000's, after competing in my first ever barista competition, I manned the Synesso booth on the show floor. Synesso was a very young company at the time. Up at Victrola Coffee on 15th (the original store) we had the second Synesso Cyncra machine ever built, and the first in any commercial setting. (That machine is still in operation, by the way, right down the street from where I am writing this... I had a shot of espresso off of it just the other day.)

So there weren't that many baristas on Earth that had experience using a Synesso — maybe ten or twelve of us. They asked me, along with my co-worker Kyle, to man the booth over the weekend of Coffee Fest. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks later, while working a shift at Victrola, I got a call in the back room from someone who wanted private barista lessons. Actually it was the personal assistant of the man who wanted lessons. The man turned out to be Nathan Myhrvold. Apparently I had pulled a shot of coffee (roasted by this guy) for him at Coffee Fest that made him go out an buy his own one-group Synesso (check his wiki page if you are wondering who has the kind of money to buy an $8000 espresso machine based off of one shot). He hadn't been able to reproduce the shot in his home, so I went there and did some private lessons with him. Whether the lessons did the trick, I don't really know.

I forgot about this little episode, except occasionally as an anecdote at coffee parties in Anaheim or Minneaopolis, until last year a fact-checker contacted me to confirm the spelling of my name for a 2,438 page encyclopedia called Modernist Cuisine. This is Myhrvold's magnum opus on cooking. I was pleased and tickled to learn I would get a passing mention in the book, when the subject of coffee was mentioned. I still haven't read the actual book. That's a lot of pages.

Well, in Will Self's article Gastronomia: The beatification of our daily bread (subscription only), he happens to mention my name and the name of Victrola. Again, it's not really much at all. The only reason I'm going into this whole self-indulgent recollection is because it's Harper's, and Harper's was so very dear to my heart for so long.

But here comes the kicker. Self (whose writing I have always enjoyed) singles out Myhrvold's pretentiousness in what is a general take-down of over-indulgent foodie-ism. And I happen to agree with Self that the current, post-modern obsession with food is, well, frankly nauseating.

How bittersweet then, for yours truly, to read what he says:

One expects in life to be talked town to from time to time, but to be patronized by a cookbook? And I could aver that for sheer self-indulgent daffiness, Myhrvold's own account of being pulled a "God shot"—the ultimate and spiritually transfiguring shot of espresso—by Daniel Humphries of Victrola Coffee at a Seattle trade fair, takes the proverbial biscotti.

Well, that's all the daffy self-indulgence I have for you today. Regularly scheduled programming resumes on flurmsday.

Word Clouds for Different Varietals

Here is some more analysis, in visual form, of the soil and varietal analysis I did of last year's coffee crop in Puerto Rico. I entered each word every time it appeared on a cupping form, and correlated the data with different varietals. I have many of these charts made, but the files are large, so I'm posting just four here to give you an idea of how they look.

Most of these descriptors are aromatics, because the standard cupping forms have numerical scores for acidity, flavor, balance, and other major categories. Still, if a cupper (myself included) made a note of anything specific, no matter what the category, I included it in these diagrams.

The larger the word is, the more often it came up. The colors are included for contrast only — there is no data attached to the word colors. Click on the pictures to see them up close.

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Fig. 7: descriptors for BOURBON Strong positive aromatics, including notable honey, chocolate, toast, and caramel. Strongest presence of the very positive sweet, as well as the positive tangy.

Fig. 4: descriptors for CATIMOR Dry is the dominant characteristic, indicated a dry, unpleasant mouthfeel or aftertaste. Ordinary nutty aromatics dominate, with malty tendencies. Negative peanutty and astringent notes are common.

Fig. 9: descriptors for TOP NINE COFFEES (all varietals) In all we find that the very best Puerto Rican coffees tend to be sweet, bright, tangy and smooth or delicate, with high incidence of honey, nutty, lemon, caramel, chocolate, toast, and floral aromatics

Fig. 10: descriptors for BOTTOM NINE COFFEES (all varietals) Overall, below-average to poor Puerto Rican coffees suffer from musty and peanutty aromatics, and show high incidence of sourness, dryness, and a lack of sweetness.

Does Altitude Matter More For Certain Varietals Than For Others?

Here are some of the results I've compiled of our large project classifying soil types and investigating the influence of soil, climate, and varietal on cup quality in Puerto Rico.

These graphs and comments are part of a much larger report, with databases and maps, which will be released soon. Just a little preview, which I hope you find interesting. The purpose of this project is to help farmers improve quality and prices in Puerto Rico. All the data collected, and all of the analysis, will be published and distributed to farmers (in Spanish and Enlgish), so that they can put our findings into action for their own benefit.

How did I arrive at these data points? The altitude and varietal information was provided by the USDA researchers in Puerto Rico. Each sample was collected individually, and sample collectors made a GPS recording on-site, standing next to the trees from which the cherries were taken. These readings include latitude, longitude, and altitude above sea level. The cupping scores are the result of a week of extensive blind cupping done by a team of Q-graders (myself included) in California, in May. Each sample was cupped multiple times, in random order, and the scores you see here are means taken from all the individual scores recorded.

The portion quoted here refers to other sections of the document which are not publicly available yet. Sorry, you'll just have to wait!

(click on graphs to embiggen)

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Altitude

There is a strong correlation between the quality of the samples and the altitude at which the coffee was grown at. As one would expect, generally speaking, the higher the coffee was grown, the higher it scored on the cupping table. This is one of the strongest relationships we found in all the data.

While not all of the high-grown coffees were in the very upper echelon of cupping scores, most of them were. And the relationship is even stronger at the low end of the spectrum. All of the lowest scoring coffees belonged in the lower altitude categories.

The following graph illustrates the relationship between coffee quality and altitude, across all varietals and soil types:

This graph shows an average gain in quality of just over 2 points from the lowest altitudes to the highest.

Altitude by varietal

One of the most interesting findings in all of the data we collected and analyzed was that improvements due to altitude were much stronger when certain varietals were used. This leads us to the conclusion that producers at higher altitudes would benefit even more by switching to the preferred varietals.

Once again, the average improvement (shown above) for higher altitudes was just over 2 points.

The next graph shows what that improvement looked like when we limit the analysis to just limaní, fronton, and catimor (three low-scoring varietals):

We can observe the same general upward trend that we saw in the comprehensive data set. However, if we read the graph closely, we can observe that the improvement is much less dramatic. In fact, there is barely 1 point of quality improvement in over 2000 feet of altitude increase. Producers who plant these varietals (fronton, limani, and catimor) at high altitude are not receiving the full benefit of their natural altitude advantage.

Let us now contrast this with the data from a different subset, using the high-scoring varietals pacas, bourbon, and caturra.

Once again, we see the expected increase in quality as altitude increases. However, in this case, the increase is far more dramatic. The low-altitude coffees score just above 80 points. But the high-altitude coffees are nearly at 84. That is nearly a 4 point gain in cup quality due to altitude, the kind of quality gains that tend to bring much higher prices in the specialty market.

Producers who are planting pacas, bourbon, and caturra at high altitude are getting a much better return on the natural advantage of high altitude.

Conclusion: As we saw in the first section, all coffee producers can expect an increase in quality by switching to higher-quality varietals. However, this switch is even more crucial for higher altitude producers. The higher the altitude, the more benefit producers can see from using these better varietals. Producers who plant lower quality varietals at higher altitudes are missing out on the huge benefit that altitude can provide.

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More to come...

Ethiopia Guide Redux

Over the winter I completed work on an Ethiopian Coffee Buying Guide. Willem Boot was the driving force behind this and he's got main author credit, and he made the amazing coffee morphology photos it contains. I wrote most of the copy and created the maps and was responsible for the overall form.

Reader Dave Janetta was kind enough to create a smaller version of the document, for ease of downloading. I only have 4 hard copies left, of the hundred or so I took to Houston for the Ethiopian delegation, so if you want a copy, Download Ethiopian coffee guide sm.

Thanks, Dave!

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).