Daniel's World of Coffee

How to Cup Coffee When You're Sick

Can you cup coffee when you have a cold? Should you cup coffee when you have a cold? The answer is yes and no, but perhaps not for the reasons you were imagining.

2014 greeted me with a nasty cold this year, and trying to drink some lovely Ethiopian coffee that I got from the shop down the street was a frustrating affair. I knew it tasted "good," but I couldn't quite tell why. It reminded me of the many times I or colleagues of mine have been forced to make a choice between cupping or not cupping when facing illness.

There's a grand irony in flying thousands of miles (often transfering through multiple airports in multiple continents) just to get somewhere to cup some coffee in a limited time. And when do we usually get a cold? Why, when we've been exposed to thousands of people from all over the world and then sealed up breathing the same air in a pressurized aluminum tube with them for 8 hours. Oh the joys! But when you only have 6 days to cup hundreds of coffees, and when you traveled 8,000 miles to do it... you find a way.

Is it possible?

First of all, strictly speaking, is it possible to cup coffee while you're sick? The answer is yes. (By "sick" in this article, I'm referring to a cold or flu that gives you congestion, a sore throat, or above all a stuffed-up nose... if you've suddenly contracted the Great Siberian Itch, I can't help you.)

You can cup coffee because your tongue is still presumably working. You have difficulty cupping coffee because your nose is all stuffed up. And as we all know (we do all know this, right everybody?) the olfactory component of sensory evaluation does the lion's share of the work. Without being able to smell things, your ability to perceive the overall flavor is deeply diminished.

But it's not completely eliminated. It's important to note that even when you are "totally" stopped up, you're usually still capable of smelling at a diminished level. If you don't believe me, try inhaling deeply from a rose bud or other intense, floral scent the next time you have a cold. You might be surprised to find just how well you can still smell it. Nevertheless, it is generally true that you can't smell nearly as well as you can when you're 100% healthy.

Beyond your temporarily damaged ability to smell, you still have your ability to taste using your tongue. You can still discern sweetness, acidity, and especially body and mouthfeel. In fact, cupping coffee while sick can be a great way to force yourself to focus on body and mouthfeel, which is a category that most cuppers have difficulty evaluating consistently (I know it was difficult for me).

So yes, you can cup when you're sick.

Should you do it?

Should you cup when you're sick? This is a different question altogether. The answer is yes. And no.

If you can put off an important evaluation until after your E.N.T. gives you a clean bill, by all means, wait until the sun is shining again. But that's often not possible.

For example, if the coffee is already roasted, and you're just starting to get sick, it could be a week before your nose is clear, by which time the coffee has staled significantly. That's a bit of a catch-22, but I'd err on the side of fresher coffee. Just do the best you can.

As I said above, many times I've been in situations where there's a time constraint. It would be nice to wait a while, but it's just not possible.

The really important thing when it comes to cupping coffee when you're sick is to be honest about it — honest with others and honest with yourself. And that leads us to...

How should you cup coffee when you're sick?

There are two key considerations; two things you need to ask yourself if you are going to cup coffee effectively when you're sick:

1) How will my sickness affect my fellow cuppers?

2) How will my sickness affect my evaluation of the coffee?

1) When you are cupping alone, you obviously don't have to worry about how your illness affects others. But in a group, it's important to be up-front about your condition. If anyone asks you to leave, you should. However, I've found that if you forthrightly explain what's going on, downplay the seriousness of it (assuming, of course, that it is indeed not serious), and come with a plan of action, most professionals are fine with sharing the room. After all, they've all been in the same situation at one time or another.

If there are enough cups on the table and you are not following strict competition protocols, you can designate one of the cups at each station as your personal cup. Make it the same cup for each sample, and make sure that everyone knows it's the "sick" cup. Then take samples only from this one cup; no one else should taste from this cup. If possible, try to get your own cup of water for cleaning your spoon too and don't share this one either.

If pushing off one cup to the side as the "sick cup" is impractical, simply wait for all other cuppers to pass through at least twice, then designate a "sick cup" and cup from that one. You won't be able to try the coffee when it's hot, but as we all know that's not the most important phase anyway.

Finally, if even that would prove to be too distracting, simply wait for all other cuppers to finish completely, then have at it.

2) It's very important to be honest with yourself when you're cupping — sick or healthy. If you can't discern something, do not just make it up.

I often teach my students to just write something, anything, even when they have no idea what to write because this tends to loosen them up and helps them to learn the process of tasting and notating. But eventually you have to grow out of this phase, and if you are still writing wild guesses in a professional environment and presenting them later as "cupping notes", you're not a good cupper. You're anti-good.

Likewise, when you're sick, despite my encouragements above (You can still taste with your tongue! You can kinda smell stuff, kinda), a lot of what you come up with might be less-than-usually accurate. Just be honest with yourself about it. Make a note on your cupping forms or later reports that these notes are sketchy at best.

Again, you can use your sickness as a blessing in disguise and focus in on non-aromatic components of the coffee, specifically acidity and mouthfeel. If you have ever had trouble grading these aspects accurately, getting a cold is the perfect time to hone your skills.

If at all possible, of course, you should cup the same coffees again when you're at full strength. This can be one more good exercise for learning, too. Make sure to randomize and encode the samples, cup them all again when you're feeling tip-top, then decode and reveal and find how well your "sick notes" match up with your "healthy notes." There's always something new to learn about the coffee, and about your own evaluation skills.

Just dive in.

Always take care of your health first, and always be mindful of the well-being of those around you. But if you take sensible precautions and remember not to treat your own notes too seriously, I encourage every coffee professional to keep tasting even when it feels like your sinuses are stuffed with cotton.

Basically, you should never be turning down an opportunity to hone your skills and broaden your knowledge. Getting sick is less than ideal for many reasons, but it's part of life, and it can lead to some pretty interesting situations if you know how to look at it from the right angle.

Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

These are some of the most common mistakes I have seen in cupping labs in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

I have a friend who is a professional taste-tester and product-tester. She works in all kinds of foods, like crackers, chocolate, wine, TV-dinners, soft drinks, and yes, even coffee. A few years back she was in charge of training some experts for a panel she was putting together.

To test her subjects, she put together a little trick, making cherry gelatin with yellow coloring. When she served the yellow gelatin to the panel and asked them to write down what flavor it was, most of the tasters wrote "lemon," a couple wrote "banana," and only one of them wrote "cherry."

Think this is a one-time incident? Check this out:

In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like "excellent" more often for the Grand Cru, and "unbalanced," and "flat" more often for the table wine. — Wall Street Journal

If you think you are immune to this effect, you're wrong. No one is immune. If you know ahead of time what you are tasting, your opinion will be influenced by your preconceptions.

And yet, people still put together coffee cuppings ignoring this principle. It's okay to do an open cupping if it's just for fun, obviously. But if you are seriously trying to get useable data from your cupping, IT MUST BE BLIND.

There is no way around this. And no, you are not an exception to this rule.

Just to be clear what I mean by "blind": the identity of each coffee should be hidden to as great a degree as possible. Most times, of course, you will know you are cupping 20 Panamas, or 8 coffees from the same roaster, or whatever. This level of knowledge if usually unavoidable. But you should have no idea which is which. To achieve this level of ignorance, use codes for each coffee and make sure to order them randomly.

Ideally, you won't even know what category of coffee you are tasting. That's always the most interesting. But it's pretty rare to not have at least some idea what the category is.

The easiest way to make a cupping blind is, of course, to have most or all of the cuppers out of the room when the organizer sets up the cupping and gives the coffees a code. But many times you will be the one who is setting things up and at the same time you are the one hoping to do some evaluation.

There's a simple way to get around this. Just double-code the coffee. Imagine I am setting up a cupping with one other friend, and we both want to score blind. I will write down one set of codes. So a coffee from the farm "Finca Alfa" becomes 001 and "Finca Beta" becomes 002, etc.

Then I leave the area and my colleague comes in and re-codes the samples. "001" becomes "282" or some other random number. "002" becomes "991" etc. She makes sure to mix the order of the coffees.

When I come back in, I have no idea what is what, and neither does she, since she never saw the original list. We both cup completely blind and our data is therefore much more reliable. Then, at the end, we trace back through our double-code and re-establish the identity of each coffee. Easy peasy.

If you are not doing this, you might be having fun cupping, but you're not learning anything about your coffee.

Incidentally, I have noticed that 99% of all espresso-tasting that goes on in the specialty coffee world isn't even remotely blind. Everyone who tastes the different espressos knows exactly what he or she is tasting. Why people think this is a maximal way to evaluate their products is beyond me. (In order for it to be even half-way useful, the taster would have to be someone other than the barista, and he or she would have to be sitting somewhere away from the espresso machine so as not to have any hints about what's going on. Really you need at minimum three people: one barista, one "server" to act as liaison, and one taster... ideally you should have several tasters). This is really a topic for another post as espresso-tasting presents unique difficulties.

But in straight cupping it's very simple and straightforward. If you are not doing it blind, you're not really doing it! So now, are you a professional, or aren't you?

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

Common Cupping Lab Mistakes — Smelly Cups

You're focused in on the coffee, you're about to write something brilliant on your cupping form. You're reaching for your pencil as you tuck your head to the side and spit into your cup. Boom. Plastic nasty reek. You've lost the brilliance.

I have set up hundreds of cuppings in over fifty different venues (I lost count somewhere), in ten different countries, from New York City to to mountains of Harar, Ethiopia. There have been cuppings in fancy restaurants, inside of tents, in world class laboratories, and hooked up to a car battery. Every situation is different and probably none is ideal. But there are certain recurring themes.

A friend recently asked me to write up a list for putting together his cupping lab. I wrote my "dream list", in which money and scarcity was no object. It was kind of fun, actually.

Rather than go through an entire list here on this blog, I am going to share with you a few of the most common problems that I've encountered in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

Spit cups are an afterthought. It's often the last thing you need in your cupping lab before you're ready to go. In many cultures it's common to use spittoons, and if you have an old-school rotating table top with chairs and sinks, you can spit in the sinks. But most cuppers in North America, and most cupping situations on the road, call for individual spit cups to be held by the cuppers.

These can be disposable cups, or ones you wash and use again. In either case, it's crucial that they don't have a strong smell — Ideally they don't have any smell at all.

For disposable cups, I prefer paper cups, the kind that most coffee shops use for "to-go" coffee. They actually do have a bit of a smell to them, but it's really only activated with hot liquid (the famous paper-cup smell that all to-go coffee takes on). If you are just spitting into the cup, it's not noticeable enough for it to be distracting.

Plastic cups can work too, but clear plastic cups are pretty gross because the slimy stuff inside is visible to all.

Some places use metal cups. Finished stainless steel works well (though they make a loud noise when you spit in them!). What's worse is tin cups or other rough metals. Not only do these cups have their own metallic smell, they tend to pick up the smell of used coffee around the interior surface, which can be quite distracting.

The worst is cheap plastic. This doesn't clean off very well and they tend to develop a stale, almost dishwater-like aroma after a few washes in hot water. It's the plastic smell of clean (unused) disposable diapers, or band-aids. Highly distracting for cuppers.

In the lab I cup in most often, we use large plastic cups. It's a high-grade plastic that doesn't melt or pick up odors. The cups are large and sturdy, unlikely to tip over, but still narrow enough to hold comfortably. As an added bonus, we have several colors of cup, so that people are less likely to get their cups confused when they set them down for whatever reason.

Any time I cup, especially in new situations, as soon as I get my spit cup in hand, I stick my nose into the clean, empty cup and take a deep whiff. If there's any lingering odor there, I want to notice it right away and get accustomed to it, so that I'm less distracted by it during the cupping.

Of course, it's much better when I take that inhale and find that there's no odor at all! Then I can concentrate all my powers of olfaction where they belong: on the coffee.

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

I have set up hundreds of cuppings in over fifty different venues (I lost count somewhere), in ten different countries, from New York City to to mountains of Harar, Ethiopia. There have been cuppings in fancy restaurants, inside of tents, in world class laboratories, and hooked up to a car battery. Every situation is different and probably none is ideal. But there are certain recurring themes.

A friend recently asked me to write up a list for putting together his cupping lab. I wrote my "dream list", in which money and scarcity was no object. It was kind of fun, actually.

Rather than go through an entire list here on this blog, I am going to share with you a few of the most common problems that I've encountered in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

Cupping Mistake #1: NOT ENOUGH HOT WATER!

Far and away the biggest problem I've run across is not enough hot water. There are only two ingredients that go into a cupping bowl: coffee and hot water. No one ever seems to forget the coffee. Remarkable how often the hot water gets neglected.

Not totally neglected, of course. People bring stoves and electric kettles. But they underestimate how much water they are going to need.

Gas stoves can be remarkably slow, especially if you are heating extra large kettles. If you do more than one table in a row, be prepared to have a longer-than-desired delay between sets. I actually prefer using gas stoves and nice, metal kettles like the one in the picture here. Another potential problem with them is that they don't often have a stated capacity written on them. Put some cold water in the kettle and get out one of your cupping bowls, and see how many times you can fill up the bowl with one kettle. Even though the water will expand a bit when it's hot and even though there will also of course be coffee in the cups when you "go live," this exercise gives you a good rough idea of how much water you can heat at one time. Multiply your result by the number of kettles you have, and you know how many cups you can do at once.

One other snake in the grass with gas stoves is a weak gas-supply. At the Ethiopia Cupping Caravan in Portland this year, we had an amazingly well-oiled machine going among our volunteers, especially considering how little time we were given to prepare and the fact we were doing it outdoors in a park, in muddy-rainy Portland, no less. One minor issue, however, was that when we got all six burners going on our Coleman gas stoves, the little gas canisters actually couldn't supply enough gas pressure for the flames to go full-on. We were left to go six weak flames or three-to-four strong ones (we chose the latter).

Just try and think of all these things ahead of time. The most important thing is not to be surprised.

Electric kettles like this one (disclaimer: I own several and used to do events for Bodum) are popular. Those kettles are great because they heat water quite fast, in about five minutes. However, if you are going to do a large cupping, you will need several. With standard 7.5 ounce cupping bowls, each kettle like this will heat enough water for about seven or eight bowls.

Let's do the math... suppose ten coffee samples, at five cups each, that's fifty cups. So we will need at least seven kettles-worth of water! That's a lot of kettles, and it leads to another problem (hey, I did say this was the most common issue, right?). Kettles like that use a lot of energy, 1500 watts. Many standard electrical circuits can only handle two of these babies at a time before kicking the circuit-breaker and shutting off the power.

Boom, there go the lights. Or, worse, the kettles are the only items on that particular circuit, so when it blows, you don't notice until it's too late. Yes, this has happened to me before. Rather frustrating to get everything ready to go, and walk over and find four kettles of cold water.

Finally, don't forget you will need lots of water for cleaning-cups (you know, for dipping your spoons into) and should generally have plenty of left over hot water for unforeseen problems (spilled samples that need to be re-cupped, etc). Calculate the total amount of water you need for the cups, then increase it by 50%. Now, do you have the capacity to heat that much water at one time, and how long will it take?

One little thing to watch out for: If you are the person running the cupping, you may have some eager assistants running around with hot water kettles. Usually things are tight on hot water and often the helpers start to fill the cleaning-cups before all the coffee has been finished. I always tell them to make absolutely sure that they get to all the coffee samples with the hottest water possible before worrying about the dipping water. You can use room-temperature water to clean your spoon in a pinch (hate doing that, but it's possible). What you cannot do is use room-temperature water to brew the coffee!

That leads us to....

How hot should the water be?

All the boys and girls know the number-answer here, I'm sure. Around 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 94 - 95 degrees Celsius.

The open secret in cupping, of course, is that really, truly, not all of the samples will get exactly the same temperature of water. The first sample you hit from a particular kettle will get hotter water than will the last sample off the same kettle. It's not a big deal because at the grind-setting and extraction time we use for cupping, a few degrees is not going to make a big difference.

But for this reason, I always err on the side of hot. Essentially, taking water right off the boil is the best way to go for most set-ups, especially in larger cuppings (and also, especially, if you are at high altitude). By the time you walk over to the cups, hit the timers, and begin pouring, it will have cooled some. And the water loses heat in the air as it flows from kettle to cup.

Never, never, never fudge things and go with water thats "almost ready!" I've seen this more times than I can count. There's a minor shortage of hot water, and someone is standing over the last kettle as it heats up, feeling impatient and nervous. He grabs the kettle before it's really done and pours it onto the last few samples. This is terrible; it's worse than not doing those samples at all. Now the cuppers will give skewed evaluations of that coffee — which is worse than if they had not given evaluations at all. Resist the temptation! Only use water that's fully at temperature.

Or better yet: Know about all these pitfalls and limitations ahead of time, plan for them, and pull off seamless cuppings that impress your friends and make the coffees shine!

I'll have a few more common cupping mistakes to write about here soon.

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

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...

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).

Panama Course: Crafting Quality at Origin

I just want to give a heads up to those of you that follow this blog: I'm teaching a course in Panama in March of 2011.

This is for folks who are damn serious about their coffee businesses and their coffee careers. The world's most unique coffee education course, among the coffee farms and cloud forests of Panama. A truly unforgettable learning experience that will launch you into the next level (and possibly several more levels beyond that).

This course is five days of intensive coffee education amid the splendor of coffee farms growing along a nature preserve in the volcanic cloud forests of Panama. It's as beautiful as it sounds.

And by the way, March is absolutely the month you want to be in the mountains of Panama. Warm and sunny without being humid. Cool breezes among the trees and mountainsides... it's paradise. The farm we are staying at is surrounded by nature preserves, and serves as a stopover for dozens of different tropical and migratory birds. In fact, they get annual groups of ornithologists that come and stay in these cabins.

But this is no idle sightseeing trip. We'll be studying intensively the workings of a coffee farm, with a special eye towards how quality is crafted. Course topics include:

• • Introduction to Sensory Analysis
• • Intensive Tasting Exercises
• • Coffee Tasting Training and Triangulation
• • Applied Roasting Theory
• • Hands-on Roasting Sessions
• • The Workings of a Coffee Farm
• • Tours of High Altitude Specialty Coffee Farms
• • Theory of Growing Coffee
• • Coffee Processing Up Close and Personal
• • Environmental and Social Sustainability
• • Buying Coffee for Your Business
• • Developing Relationships with Growers

Finally I should mention too that March is the end of the harvest season in Panama. We will have dozens upon dozens of fresh-crop, unsold specialty coffees on site for roasting and cupping. It would be great to see some of you blog-readers in Panama, but space is very limited, of course.

There's a website about the class here. Or you can send me an email to [email protected]

Roast Profiling and Cupping

For the next three days I am in Marin County, California, teaching a class at Boot Coffee Consulting. The course is called Roast Profiling and Cupping. It combines information on sensory analysis, heat-transfer dynamics, and artisan roasting techniques.

The first day of this class begins with, well, coffee of course. Once everyone's acclimated to the lab, where we have several different sample roasters, brewing equipment, an AV set-up, cupping lab, coffee library, etc, we start with a lot of theory. What's the difference between convection, conduction, and radiation when it comes to the development of coffee during the roasting process? How does processing affect the way beans of different densities absorb heat?

Then we dive right into sensory analysis. We do sessions with nuts, dried fruits, chocolates, apples of different acidity levels and sweetness levels, fruits with different kinds of mouthfeel. All this is leading into the really important stuff: the sensory analysis of coffee. Cupping, that is.

We cover cupping vocabulary, cupping protocols, cupping technique, and we do LOTS of triangulation exercises to put people through their paces. And that's all just day one.

Day two and day three involve a lot more theory, but mainly it's about roasting and cupping, and roasting and cupping, and roasting and cupping. I teach or help teach this class several times each year. We have roasters from all over the world come to learn and practice. This class has folks from California, New York, Wisconsin, Seattle, Massachusettes, Australia, and Singapore.

This week we set up a canopy outside because of the heat in Northern California. Students are starting to arrive right now as I type this. Time to go!

A Special Kind of Hotness

Part three of my videos in Panama, featuring the beautiful Tesse, the adorable Tiborcito, Daniel being way too excited to be crossing the Panama Canal, and a place that attracts bird-watchers and entomologists from all over the world.

Be sure to watch part one and part two.

Incidentally, I'm quite serious about organizing a trip to Ojo de Agua. We are looking at the week of January 3rd or January 10. I will of course post more about that if it's happening, but if you want to get at the top of the list, send me an email at [email protected].

Just to give you an idea of where all this is, I've included a map. The marker here is for the town of Volcán. Just to the northeast, you can see the large volcano. On the far side of the volcano is Finca Sofia (featured in the earlier videos, and quite close to the place shown in this video). Just north of that, shrouded in clouds in this Google Map view, is a vast protected forest land called Palo Seco. The farm lies right up against this protected zone, surrounded, in fact, on three sides by protected forest land.

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