Daniel's World of Coffee

Alive and Still Drinking Coffee

Hello coffee people!

After a long spell working on the Project Which Shall Not be Named, I'm back to the old blog. Thanks for sticking around!

I'm in Marin County, California, this week, teaching a roasting and cupping course. So because I'll be talking lots of theory this week with my students, I think I'll drop a little theory here on the blog. The class is through Boot Coffee. Willem Boot himself is on his way to Honduras and then Ethiopia, as a part of the Ethiopia Cupping Caravan project I'm also working on. So in the meantime I'm here in California teaching this course.

It's a ton of fun. I have 7 students here, learning how to cup and how to really roast with knowledge. Here in the lab (a converted garage) there are four roasting machines, an espresso machine, grinders, and more coffee making devices than you can shake a stick at. We have green coffee from every corner of the globe, even more roasted coffee, cups, spoons, videos, pictures, maps, one dog, and a cat. Just to give you an idea of what's here, here's one of the sample roasting machines we're using:

Hope you all have been well. Sorry for the absence, but once again, as always, I'm back! Happy coffee to y'all.

Understand Coffee Varieties: Pacamara

What's in a varietal? Everything! The kind of coffee plant determines how your coffee tastes. In this video I explain all about one of my favorite coffee varietals: the exotic and delicious Pacamara.

Try Pacamara coffee from PT's Coffee, "Finca Los Planes."

Try Pacamara coffee from Dancing Goats, the "Siberia Pacamara."

Try Pacamara coffee from Barefoot Coffee, "Tablon 12."

Try Pacamara coffee from Plowshares Coffee, "Las Delicias."

Merry Roastmas

Nothing says happiness in the holiday season like a great cup of coffee. I made this video right after rolling out of bed on Christmas morning... all y'all who make fun of me for wearing a suit and tie to the coffee conventions, here you can see me all bleary-eyed wearing my zipper-hoodie and Seahawks shirt. That's organic Daniel there.

In this video I took some medium-high grown Bourbon coffee from El Salvador and roasted it just past second crack. I'm serving it to a big crowd of people (sisters and parents and various suitors of said sisters, natch), so I chose a medium roast for this coffee. It's a versatile bean and could go darker or lighter, but in my experience this style of bean at this level of roast is a real crowd pleaser.

I just had a cup of it while I was waiting for the video to upload, and it's really sweet and chocolatey. Remember... theory is great, but in the end, coffee should taste good!

Happy holidays to everyone. I hope your day is merry and bright.

Coffee Circa 1957, Part 3

More images from the pamphlet, "Coffee: The Story of a Good Neighbor Product."

A few about coffee exporting, roasting, and preparation, first. Click the images to enlarge...

Plus, I can't resists this pretty page which introduces the activities for school students...

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...

Coffee Circa 1961

Happy Ingrate Day

Dear friends, I am in the land that time forgot, the land wherein the infection first festered, Seattle, USA.

Sunday/Monday I was in California for about 24 hours, helping to spread the love/word about Salvadoran coffee. Then it was on to the Great Northwhilst to do the same, and drive under dismal gray skies at midday. I haven't had a spare moment to hit up the cafés, but I'm carving out some time tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'd like to report that I'm starting to feel really partial to Salvadoran coffees, like to an old lover. All the necessary qualities are there: the beauty, the sweetness, the tang, and the moments of unexpected surprise. On Sunday night in Marin County, California, I stayed up late roasting coffees in the full-spectrum-lit lab of Willem Boot, on his lovely orange roaster; batch after batch of El Salvadors. I left New York City that morning, where things were headache-bright and cold as f***. California, upon deplaning, was predictably, mockingly balmy and soft. The air there has a silky quality you never know you're missing if you don't leave the East. There's a fig tree growing in the back yard at Willem's house.

Those coffees, roasted with love and alacrity (yes the two coexist), tasted all sweet and yet all different the next morning when we cupped them. Fifteen or so Bay Area lovelies made the trip out Golden Gate-wise to see us (and some new brewing equipment about which I will tell you soon... or don't bother reading it here cause I have a feeling it will be all over the place within a year). Again in Seattle, with CA in my rearview, the coffees were pulling into mind oranges and chocolates and the hills of Chalatenango, where I saw farmers learning to cup, all cowboy hats and creased faces. I've been five times to El Salvador in the last year, which is no boast but rather to point out it feels like another home almost and home feels nice but it also frees you up to really start saying some real stuff. You can take the kid off your gloves and throw a couple grown-up punches. I say without reservation that damn, when the Salvadorans do it up right, they do it up right.

Thanksgiving's come and gone (and I've made more than a couple pots for the parientes in the mean), and even though the stuff I have is roasted super light for cupping purposes, I'm feeling the beaches of La Libertad and the slopes of Santa Ana as I sit and watch my poor, bedraggled Seahawks take another lick on the chin. Here's to good coffee and family, to having a little food in your belly, and if the right team doesn't always win, at least the popcorn tasted good.

Pointless Violets and Espresso

I'm in San Salvador all week this week teaching a course on advanced roasting. We've got some of the biggest roasters in the country here, along with some of the micro-roasteries. The class has been fantastic, and everyone is very involved and doing great work on the cupping table and at the sample roasters.

But I'm talking in Spanish all day (and using technical terms too, like "proceso endotérmico" etc) and so basically I'm completely wiped at the end of the day. I think it's actually a scientific fact that this makes you tired. Seriously. Your brain uses so much more blood and oxygen when it has to churn non-stop like that just to communicate... And I'm not just chatting, but leading and lecturing the class all day. At night it's been the most I can muster to hang out with people a little bit afterwards, then go swimming and go to bed. Hence the no posting.

The last few days in New York were very interesting. I saw some good old friends at a Burundi-focussed cupping at Crop to Cup's Brooklyn office, which cupping was followed with huge tacos at Pequeña with said friends. (Don't ask about those Burundi's btw.... ugh... they're not C2C's coffees, just some samples an exporter sent them that they decided to cup just to see what was there).

I also taught a home barista class Saturday afternoon at Intelligentsia's beautiful SoHo training space. It was a dreary day outside (you can see a beautiful stretch of NYC streets from the 9th story window), and inside all was clean and beautiful and well maintained... very meditative. Next door someone was playing the saxophone, and we just made coffee and chatted all afternoon while it rained outside. A lovelier coffee afternoon was rarely had. I felt transported back to my humble Seattle days, when all that mattered was pulling a good shot and more often than not a good shot was pulled. But this leads me to my next point....

NEWS FLASH!!! Black Cat espresso is FREAKING GOOD!!! I tasted something I haven't tasted in a long time. I don't even really know where to start. I feel I need to do an interview with Kyle Glanville or something and get to the bottom of things... but this espresso was something I haven't had in... 3 years, maybe?

This iteration was new, 70% screen-dried Brazilian yellow bourbon; and 30% fully-washed red bourbon from El Salvador, designed and imported by the aformentioned Glanville... who by the way is also a new daddy!!

But that espresso... So thick, rich, chocolately. Oh wow. I had to sit down. It made me so happy. Damn... just thinking about it now... I want one. Oof.

Finally, I'm hosting a relatively private event in Manhattan on Tuesday night, featuring the top coffees from El Salvador as decided upon by Willem Boot and Ken Davids, basically two of the best independent cuppers in North America. If you work in coffee, and are serious about stuff, please drop me a line and I will send you an invite. It's going to be fun, and there should be some good inside information available. daniel (and then an at-sign) coffeescholars (dot) com.

Finally finally, I give the final final word to my beloved DH Lawrence:

" Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. "

A Woman Made of Coffee and the Blog That Never Was

1. Ecuador was interesting: You don't think of Ecuador when you think of specialty coffee? They are just getting into that game there, as an industry. I was one of 9 official judges for the second annual Taza Dorada competition there. Our panel: Three United Statesians, one Salvadoran, one Guatemalan, two Colombians, two Ecuadorians, and one Peruvian. Everything was lovely and the people were fantastic; however, the competition was very rough around the edges, as you might expect from a second-year operation.

It may seem (to those who are not George Howell), that things like the Cup of Excellence just spring fully formed from the foreheads of the coffee gods. But in fact, in order to even have a Cup of Excellence, years and years of groundwork have to be put into (a) making the coffee good enough and (b) learning how to put on a competition. The Ecuadorians are in a crash course to do both these things at once.

The potential for the coffee is definitely there. The first-place coffee was quite nice; I scored it a 87 (which was my highest score and I believe was probably one of the 3 or 4 highest scores anyone gave out). At the same time, though, on the final table were several coffees that really didn't deserve to be there, quality-wise. Most of the samples we cupped were not 100% clean. We detected drying-related problems in the majority of the samples.

As part of the general disorganization (coffee-wise), the panel of judges was enlisted in actually making the competition happen, which meant driving to neighboring provinces to pick up samples, hand-milling parchment coffee, hand-sorting and grading coffee, roasting on a jerry-rigged roaster, replacing grinder burrs, and coming up with a protocol for the cupping... And, oh yeah, actual cupping too.

There was a little bit of grumbling, I must say, since people weren't expecting to be involved with this. But I was mainly there to learn about Ecuadorian coffee in the first place, so it really didn't bother me much. I had some beautiful moments of peace sitting in that lab (in the middle of a huge roasting/export facility in the port city of Manta) sorting out green coffee with a beautiful woman from Colombia. I made her a man out of coffee beans, and she made me a woman. All the pictures of the (coffee bean) woman are staying private cause, you know, she's my new girlfriend, but here's the man...

As expected, the ceviche and plantains were outstanding. I went swimming in the Pacific at 2 a.m. while a salsa band played loudly for a beach party nearby (which would have been the perfect night, except for that I stupidly left my journal on the beach... wasted words on the waves of the world tonight, I suppose). Fantastic new friends... and I can't wait to go back and see where the coffee world is headed there... certainly up.

2. More New York Times For the nth time in the last two years, the New York Times has an article about the surging specialty coffee scene in New York City. This one appeared in the City section last weekend, so you didn't see it if you read the paper edition outside of the metro area. Lots of beautiful visuals with this one.. .and it's a long article!

The writer, Ted Botha, interviewed me for this one. I had lots to say about the whole phenomenon (as usual the blabbermouth, me); unfortunately, Ted used only one of the less-positive things I said to feature in the article. When I walked into Gimme! this week to get a macchiato, Mike White called me a "hater." Ouch.

Here's the section in its entirety:

Given the explosion of the city’s coffee scene in recent years, it is hard to find anyone in its ranks who does not sound upbeat. One of the few voices of dissent comes from Daniel Humphries, founder of the New York Coffee Society. “Every time I think we are surpassing the West, they are pushing things out there,” said Mr. Humphries, who can often be found presiding over cuppings at places like Cafe Grumpy and El-Beit in Williamsburg, where people sip the latest coffee varietals the way wine lovers sample new vintages. “There are places here with the trappings of the third wave, but they use inferior coffee.” Nevertheless, Mr. Humphries is also part of a community that would be hard, if not impossible, to find in any other food quarter.

Of course, I'm very upbeat in general about the coffee scene here! Duh! I don't consider myself a "voice of dissent." I'm a full-on kool-aid drinking cheerleader, as you all know. So I would call that phrasing some creative drama-injection by Botha and his editors.

Nevertheless, in the context of a 30 minute discussion of the whole scene, I did say the things I am quoted as saying. My comment about "out West" is based on what I have seen at Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, Intelly-LA and Stumptown in the last two years. They really are still leading the way. That's not a knock on NYC, just the way I see it.

As for "inferior coffee," unfortunately this is also true, though it's certainly not only a New York thing. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to name names in a public forum like this, but in my honest, professional opinion, some very nice shops use unfortunately mid-grade coffee. There, I said it! Is anyone really that shocked?

Anyway, nice as always to see these articles. Rising tide lifts all boats, wot wot?

3. Daniel in Imbibe Magazine: On the subject of the media and Daniel the blabbermouth, check out the latest issue of Imbibe magazine. Kate Simon has a snappy and quite useful article about serving coffee at parties. I'm actually very impressed with Imbibe's ability to create and cover new angles in their magazine. And as always, the visuals are smashingly gorgeous.

The article covers what to do when serving coffee for 4, for 10, or for 50 people, with pointers from yours truly. You can click through the "TAKE A PEEK INSIDE OUR CURRENT ISSUE" button to read the article ("Holiday Coffee") at the Imbibe website, or pick one up the future-mulch issue at the market.

4. Plowshares Coffee Roasters: Long-time New York Coffee Society member and general all-around great guy Anthony Kurutz has launched his much-anticipated roasting company!!! Huzzah!!!

It's called Plowshares Coffee Roasters and it's a welcome addition to the New York coffee world... an indigenous boutique roasting company with an emphasis on quality and sustainability. And I just love that logo.

Anthony sent me a few pounds of fresh-roasted coffee this week, and it's been sustaining me every day. I especially love the pacamara from El Salvador. I'm really getting to love this coffee (pacamara in general), and Anthony does the beauty beans justice... crispy acidity, a hint of exotic spice, and almost incense-like cedar notes. Way to go Anthony. Viva Plowshares.

5. The universe stretches on ever into infinity: And I'm happy to be on board.

"The epitome of this practice is the general, the central figure of the Sun Tzu. This general is a sage commander, someone who goes beyond the conceptualizing activity that constitutes good planning, effective strategy or even wisdom. Seeing the whole, the sage commander creates endless forms from within it. This ability arises from human capacities to see, hear and know the world that are common to everyone." --Denma

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.” --D. H. Lawrence

Expert Coffee Course in Manhattan

So what have I been up to that's led to such silence?

Check it out! Coffee has grown up a lot in New York City in the last two years... now's your chance to get ahead of the curve. Come take a course with me and Willem Boot, September 5-7 in Manhattan.

Email courses (at) bootcoffee (dot) com to sign up, or email me at [email protected] if you have any questions and would like to discuss. I'm really excited about this course. It's going to be very high-level, so serious coffee learners only, please!

Also, please note: There's a sliding scale for baristas.