Daniel's World of Coffee

I Should Have Been a Funk Singer (Coffee of the Week)

Here's part two of my visit to the CEL. And yes, I sing on this video, inspired by coffee. If you can't understand my hyper-excited babbling at the end, I'm saying, "Thanks Intelligentsia... Thanks Geoff Watts... Thanks Kenyan Coffee Producers!"

This is my coffee of the week, incidentally. Hands down.

Part one of my visit to the CEL here.

If you don't know what the heck I was singing about during the making of the Chemex, Stephen Morrissey's cool Chemex video here.

Not the same Gichathaini Kenya, but another fresh Kenya from Intelligentsia here.

Scott Rao's book here.

Don't forget to drink lots of coffee before you go out tonight, and Happy New Year everybody!

Why is My Coffee Soapy?

A soapy taste in coffee is the mark of one of two things. Either:

(A) there is soap in your coffee! or....

(B) your coffee is underextracted.

Now the first suggestion that there may be soap in your coffee is not altogether tongue-in-cheek. There very may well be. If you think you taste something funky in your coffee, you should always check for foreign agents first: is the brewer fully cleaned, rinsed out and seasoned with coffee? What about your cup? When is the last time you took a look at the interior of your grinder hopper? (This may not seem like a likely source of soapy tastes in a coffee shop, but many home brewers keep grinders on countertops where they can get all kinds of other food or cleaning products in them.) So, first make sure the soapy taste isn't actually soap.

Because if it's not, you have a different problem entirely. One that's just about as common as a bar of Ivory soap. Soapy tastes in coffee are a mark of underextraction.

Remember: underextraction is not the same thing as weak flavor. A coffee can be full strength or even extra-strong and still be underextracted. And it could be overextracted and yet still weak (that's way too common for me to even think about right now without getting grumpy.)

Underextraction refers to what percentage of the solubles in the ground coffee are ending up in your brew. Each compound in a coffee bean — and there are hundreds — has a different flavor. Since the different compounds extract (that is, dissolve into the brew) at different rates, that means that a coffee extracted quickly will taste differently than one that takes a long time.

If I extract just 1% of a hundred coffee beans, I will have a full bean's worth of solubles, but they will be all the same boring flavor from that first moment of extraction. If I could somehow extract 100% of one coffee bean (not technically possible, but play along), I would have the same amount of solubles, but a much more overextracted, bitter taste. In fact, it would taste like chewing on a coffee bean. The fact that chewing on a bean is generally not as pleasant as drinking a well-extracted cup of coffee shows us just how important a proper rate of extraction is. If it weren't important, we would all just eat coffee instead of drink it.

There are devices that measure extraction, the most interesting of which is the Extract MoJo. I recommend at least learning about this topic if you are a professional. But the best tool — for professional and enthusiasts alike — is always your tongue. Remember Daniel's mantra: Coffee should taste GOOD!

The ideal rate of extraction is right around 20% of each bean. Keep in mind this has nothing to do with strength! Only flavor. If you want stronger coffee, you should just get 20% from more beans... not go for a higher percentage. If you want weaker coffee, back off of the amount of coffee, but leave it at a 20% extraction rate.

Practically speaking, getting back to soapy coffee, if your coffee tastes soapy, the water needs to spend more time with the coffee, or the water needs to be hotter, or both. If you run water through coarsely-ground coffee in under 1 minute, for example, you will have underextracted, soapy coffee. Pour the water more slowly, or make the grind finer so the water has to work more slowly through the slurry. There are also, of course, other factors (like water composition, and many others) that can affect extraction rate.

Some other words people associate with the taste of underextracted coffees are sour, minerally, metallic. To me, it sometimes tastes like a piece of aluminum. This is all on my mind because yesterday I poured myself a Chemex a little too eagerly and a Kenyan coffee that has been kind to me all week suddenly tasted flat, soapy, and just plain bad.

Remember kids, Don't Do What "Danny Don't" Does. Make your coffee right. Leave the soap in the soapdish, and the coffee in the pot.

Smell and Memory

Here's an interesting article on the topic of how the brain processes scent. I sometimes touch on this topic in my classes. It can be frustrating to coffee people when they recognize a smell but can't put a name to it. I always remind people: it's not your fault! It is difficult. Keep trying!

Why is smell so sentimental? One possibility, which is supported by this recent experiment, is that the olfactory cortex has a direct neural link to the hippocampus. In contrast, all of our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed somewhere else - they go to the thalamus - and only then make their way to our memory center. This helps explain why we're so dependent on metaphors to describe taste and smell. We always describe foods by comparing them to something else, which we've tasted before. ("These madeleines taste just like my grandmother's madeleines!" Or: "These madeleines taste like the inside of a lemon poppy seed cake!") In contrast, we have a rich language of adjectives to describe what we see and hear, which allows us to define the sensory stimulus in lucid detail. As a result, we don't have to lean so heavily on simile and comparison.

Smelling, tasting, and using words to describe the two all at the same time is like trying to play basketball, soccer, and a video game all at the same time. The key to getting "good at smelling" is to practice again and again. And when you try something new and unusual, try to make a distinct memory of the experience (including non-smell things like the people you are with, the sounds and sights, etc).

Ethiopia on the Horizon

I'm leaving for Ethiopia in about a week, to help put together a couple of really exciting projects. I'll talk more about those projects here, to be sure, but for today I just wanted to share this amazing, amazing map.

You can click on the map to enlarge it, or you can click here to make it REALLY large.

This map, made in 1972, is available online from the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps. It shows the different base rock types for the different areas of Ethiopia. (This map also includes Eritrea in the north, which is now an independent country.)

Cross-referencing with a cleaner political map, one can find the soil types for the different coffee producing areas. Let's take a couple of famous coffee towns. There's none more famous that Yergacheffe. That's due east of Lake Abaya, the foot-shaped lake in the central-southwest part of the country. According to the map, the soil there, marked with an orange wedge surrounded by yellow and green, is in the Volcanic Rock group (no surprise there); the "Trap Series" subgroup; is from the Paleocene-Oligocene-Miocene eras; and is composed primarily of Alkali olivine basalt and tuffs, and rare rhyolites. That's a lot of information.

What about Harar? Look in the central eastern part of the map, due south of the "French Territory of the Affars and Issas" (now the nation of Djbouti). There's a thick band of yellow, and just south of that a crenellated, complicated area of pink, purple, lavender and orange. This is where Harar is, and the town itself is a purple region, built on sandstone and shale from the Triassic-Liassic period. Totally different.

I don't know enough about soil to tell you exactly what all this means. I remember my junior high geology — and I know a thing or two about how soil types affect coffee, but to my knowledge no one has really broken this down much further than volcanic vs non-volcanic, except on the agronomical level — certainly not taste-wise anything other than anecdotally on the tongues of master cuppers. But you can make some broad assumptions based on information like this, and I look forward to the time when better records are kept (by people like yours truly) and when we can start gathering and collating some serious data on soil types and flavor profiles.

But more than the science, what first caught me about this map was the beauty. It captures what Ethiopia is to me, a land of incredible natural and cultural diversity. As far as coffee producing countries go, there's nowhere else like Ethiopia, and there never will be. The flavors there are as diverse as the micro-regions on this map. There are about 70 languages spoken there. There are thousands upon thousands of different coffee tree varietals, as opposed to the 6 or 8 you might find in a Latin American country. Processing can vary widely from place to place. It's a bit dizzying, occasionally frustrating, and always rewarding.

I don't mean to suggest that Ethiopia is the only place with complex growing conditions. Take a look at any other geological map of this type (here's a beautiful one of Colombia, for example (big file warning again), and you will see a similar rainbow (though not often in the same shattered-glass patterns as you see in this map). For me, this map is just a symbol of all the incredible variety that Ethiopia has to offer. A visual representation of the way the country truly is. Almost like... like a map. Ha.

I'm looking forward to tasting this coffee in its original birthplace again very soon, to meeting with and breaking bread with the people who grow it and drink it, and to sharing about it with all of you here. Stay tuned.

Where Does Sweetness Come From? Part Three: Roasting

Coffee should be sweet. Ok, so you have a wonderful, naturally sweet, perfectly harvested green coffee, that was then carefully processed so as to preserve that beautiful sweetness. Now what?

Well, now it's time to roast that coffee. Roasting is a very complicated process. There are hundreds of different organic compounds within a single coffee bean, and every single one of them reacts differently to the process of roasting. The most important process to understand when it comes to the formation of sweetness and other flavors in coffee is what is called a Maillard Reaction. This is the process of amino acids interacting with sugars to form new compounds in the course of applying heat to a food.

One way to think about how roasting affects sweetness is by the analogy of caramelizing sugars. If you have ever sauteed onions, then you know this process. As the onions are cooked further, they become sweeter and sweeter due to the caramelization of the sugars in the onion. This is actually another form of the Maillard Reaction.

Generally speaking, as you roast coffee it gets sweeter and sweeter, up to a point. Behold my mighty MS Paint skills! (click it to enlarge.) So in a very light roast (or cinnamon, or "cupping" roast), fewer of the sugars have caramelized, leading to a brighter-toned, more sour cup. As you proceed darker and darker, the Maillard Reactions continue, producing more and more sweetness in the cup.

However, there are diminishing returns on this once you begin to carbonize some of the cellulose and other starches in the bean. Sometime after "second crack" in the roasting process, dried-out portions of the bean begin to carbonize (turn to char and ash). This process can go on even while Maillard Reactions continue. This is why the best dark roasts can be very sweet without being too ashy. But it must be done with extreme care and skill. Very quickly the ashy bitterness can take over the cup, and carbonization can begin to kill those sugars the roaster was trying to cultivate. To go back to our onion analogy, this is like leaving the onions on the pan until they are black and smoking and dry.

As you can see from the rough schematic graph above, roasting is a balancing act. The graph I drew is extremely basic, and doesn't necessarily apply to all types of beans or machines. But it gives you an idea of how different factors are changing at different rates over time. A skilled roaster has to choose which spot along the curve he or she wants to arrive at (something that is best determined on the cupping table, of course, with many many samples of roasted coffee).

Not only that, but the roaster must choose how to arrive at that point. One cannot simply pick a time and temperature and then walk away. Because different chemical reactions are happening at different times during the roasting process, the roaster must also pick the "curve" he or she will use to reach the desired roast degree. Will it be a fast-ramping curve, a slow-building one, or a complicated S-curve that brings out just the right sweetness while preserving acidity and the more delicate aromatics?

The answer to all these questions would take (and has taken) an entire book to investigate fully. But I hope this little primer helps explain where sweetness comes from in the roasting process.

Our little bean has gone a long way since being planted in the ground at the farm, but it still has a long way to go before it's a perfect cup of sweet coffee...

Where Does Sweetness Come From? Step Two: Processing

This is the next post in a little series that is introduced here; Part One about the plant is here.

For people who can't do it (and sometimes even for those of us who can), latte art can seem like the hardest thing there is to do in coffee. Well, it's the second hardest. The hardest thing in coffee is getting that damn sticky mucilage off the parchment.

I'm talking, of course, about coffee processing. If you don't know what I'm referring to with mucilage and parchment, Wikipedia has a fairly good, succinct introduction to coffee processing.

I want to talk about the origins of sweetness in the processing stage, but it might be more accurate to talk about the preservation of sweetness. Processing has a huge influence on the flavor of a coffee, but most of the time it's a matter of not ruining the coffee. You can put in the ripest, most delicate and beautiful high-grown coffee cherries in one end of the coffee mill and get rotten, spoiled, fermented coffee out the other side.

Geoff Watts, green buyer for Intelligentsia and all-around coffee savant has an amusing and apt analogy for the creation/preservation of quality in coffee. He says the bean is like a cowboy walking down the main street of an Old West town in a shoot-out. It's trying to get from the farm to your cup, and the whole way it's being shot at. The coffee has to dodge many bullets to make it to your cup in good condition. Well, the processing stage is like the saloon where most of the bad guys are hiding out... the coffee's got more dangerous bullets to dodge in that stretch of road than anywhere else.

In the processing stage, the two main goals are to get the fruit off the coffee, and to dry the coffee out. There are too many variations in how coffee is processed to get into it in detail here, but there are some universals. If the fruit doesn't come off cleanly or efficiently, you have problems with fermentation and dirty flavors in general. If the coffee is not dried properly, you have problems with phenolic tastes, mold, and a whole host of other problems. And all during these stages, there is the possibility of contaminating the coffee with unclean equipment and/or storage facilities.

So to sum up, sweetness is not created during processing, it is only ever really destroyed or preserved. Good processing is all about preserving the wonderful sweetness that Mother Nature and the farmers cultivated in the first place.

There is one possible exception to this rule, and that is "natural" processed coffee. (I'll use that term to encompass the varied natural styles, like sun-dried natural, "pulp natural," etc.) In these cases, the fruit is being dried onto the parchment coffee. As you can imagine if you've ever eaten a raisin or a dried apricot, it tends to concentrate the sticky sweet sugars in the fruit. The bean inside this fruit then tends to "soak up" some of this sticky sweetness, resulting in the unique flavor characteristics you get from natural-process coffees.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding natural coffees in the specialty industry. Some consider their flavors to be, by definition, defective. I don't particularly feel like wading into that quicksand right now, but I will say that I happen to adore well-cared-for natural coffees, and some of the greatest coffee experiences I have ever had were with natural coffees. Any discussion of sweetness and processing would be incomplete without mentioning naturals.

In general, though, with naturals as with washed coffee, it's all about not getting shot, so to speak. That bean has a lot farther to go before it ends up in your mouth as sweet, delicious coffee....

Where Does Sweetness Come From? Step One: The Plant

Earlier this week I promised a little bit more on the topic of sweetness in coffee.

First of all, to review, good coffee should be sweet. There are many different stages and processes that coffee goes through on the way to your mouth, and each one can have a profound impact on the sweetness. The first stage is the coffee tree itself.

Coffee is a fruit. What we roast up and brew is the seed of that fruit. Just like any fruit, coffee is sweetest when it's ripe, and the same holds true for the seeds (the "beans"). When fully ripe the seeds hold all kinds of complex organic compounds which would serve as food for a growing coffee seedling, including a complex family of sugars and other sweet compounds.

Some people used to claim that the reason that the Kopi Luwak coffee (you know, the famous "poo coffee") was so sweet was that the civet cat ate only ripe fruit, in a special mysterious civet cattish way that humans were forever ignorant of. Well, that explanation might have flown back in the bad old days. Today, though of course most human coffee production unfortunately involves lots of green cherries still, there are hundreds of quality operations out there that select only ripe red cherries. Humans have proven every bit as reliable in choosing only red as a civet cat could ever hope to be. Come on, humans, cut your species some slack! We're not that stupid.

Speaking of stupid, the first time I visited a coffee farm during harvest, I was so stoked to be eating the fruit that I ate dozens of cherries and later ended up with a severe headache, stomach ache and palpitating heart. Those cherries are caffeinated, too! I just figured that out way too late.

A few more notes on sweetness as a function of the coffee plant itself:

The higher the altitude the coffee was born at, the denser the beans tend to be. This can lead to an increase in acidity, complexity, and yes, sweetness.

Rainfall and sunlight can greatly influence the sweetness of a given coffee, but it's not the case that more or less of one or the other will lead to more sweetness. It's a complex interaction. Coffee trees, for instance, do best in mixed sunlight and shade. The percentages of this shade depends on the latitude of the farm, the altitude, the soil, and the varietal.

I'm not aware of any direct relationship between soil-type and sweetness. Obviously, proper soil for a given plant will lead to healthy, sweet fruit. But I do not know of any correlation between one particular soil type and levels of sweetness in the cup. This kind of thing generally shows up more in the aromatics (the iron tastes in volcanic soil coffees, for example). If anyone has information on the question of soil and sweetness, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

So the first step in sweet coffee is sweet coffee fruit. If you start with green, unripe cherries, even in relatively small amounts, you are sabotaging the whole thing right from the start. But that's only the first step. We still have a long way to go to a sweet beverage.

Next time I will take a look at how processing affects sweetness.

coffee cherry photo by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bloggle/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Gelatinous Noobs

Listening to Coleman Hawkins and the sun has been out this week. Today I cleaned out the single dirtiest espresso grinder I've ever seen. It was a La San Marco SM91, a pretty good little machine, but good God it was filthy. It had apparently been run a few times and then left completely alone. The coffee powder lodged into all the little internal slots and burrs had turned into a gelatinous, night-colored coating over all that brass. I scraped it off in long, curling peels of filth with a screwdriver, one little lane of clean at a time. My compatriot in scouring remarked that it reminded him of some of the filthiest deep-fryers he's been around.

In any case, we got the sucker clean and she works like a charm. The burrs are like brand new. We still didn't manage to pull any good espresso on it (another task for another day), but I had a distinct feeling of satisfaction seeing that steel and copper gleaming. Now if I could just get the filth out from under my fingernails.

Saturday I returned from El Salvador. While there I had a chance to cup about 40 fresh crop samples across three days, mostly from Apaneca/Lamatepec (aka Santa Ana), and came away really impressed. The focus on specialty in El Salvador is more apparent every time I go there; I think it's going to be one of the origins of the year this year, despite the irregular rains earlier in the growing season.

Already, a couple of the farms I visited in the east were done picking and had begun the long and laborious work of pruning. I had fun helping to cut back a few trees and painting the stumps with bright blue copper sulfate solution to protect them from fungus. It's a part of the growing process I have had explained to me before, but this was my first chance to observe and participate first hand. In one year the shoots will grow back with fresh life, and in two years they will produce fruit again, with more vigor than the older branches had been doing. Typically a well-managed farm does this to about a fifth of their plantation a year, to keep everything continually renewed.

As always, I brought back some samples. In this case, they are particular valuable: all fresh-crop, and all from top farms. In all it's about 3 kilos of green gold. I'll be sharing it with the public along with the top of last year's crop at an event in New York City soon, so stay tuned for that.

That makes 7 trips to El Salvador in the last 15 months. I don't know when I am going to go back again; all the projects I have been working on are wrapping up, and the new projects I have in the fire are still in the incubation stage. I suppose it won't be very long, but I really can't speculate at this point. Next trips on the horizon will most likely be Nicaragua and Ethiopia.

And, oh yeah! Chicago! This weekend is Coffee Fest, along with the Great Lakes Regional Barista Championship. Great Lakes is one of the strongest regions in the nation. Should make for good watchin'. I have a bit of a life-change announcement to make on a related note. I'll post more about that tomorrow.

For now, ponder Steve McQueen.

Global Kitchen: Climate Change and Coffee

Here is an event upcoming for New Yorkers that promises to be very interesting.

Global Kitchen: Climate Change and Coffee

Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 pm

American Museum of Natural History

Linder Theater; first floor

Fee: $20

"Todd Carmichael, La Colombe Torrefaction Coffee Roasters & Blenders, and Danner Friedman, Rainforest Alliance, discuss growing coffee amid the realities of climate change at the American Museum of Natural History. Participants will learn how the coffee they purchase can help protect against deforestation, one of the leading causes of carbon-dioxide emissions. A coffee cupping will introduce several coffee varietals (plant strains) grown under different environmental conditions, from slash-and-burn farms to rainforests."

I'll be there. That's about the most interesting topic for a public cupping that I have ever heard of. For those of you that can't make it, I'll be sure to post here the next day... can you taste slash-and-burn?

For more information or tickets you can contact [email protected]