Daniel's World of Coffee

Coffee Stuff I've Forgotten

Thoughtful comment by Tonx yesterday about the famous unreliability of memory got me thinking about what, exactly, I may have forgotten in my coffee days. Then, this morning, unpacking some boxes with a view of the Olympic Mountains in the distance, sharp as knives in the late autumn cold, I was searching for something to drink my morning out of and I came across this old mug...

(by the way, how ya doin there, Cougs?)

Just the other day I was drinking from a different Washington mug, that is much more handsome but which doesn't belong to me. I remember thinking to myself, "Bummer, I should get myself a Washington mug, since I don't have one."

Well, I do have a Washington mug. I just plum forgot. And, there's something oddly appealing about the cool cheesiness of the one pictured here. I believe I shall make drinking from it a habit.

Anyway, a physical mug can be brought back with (near) perfect fidelity, and a memory cannot, even with the aid of cupping notes or video. That's why the most memorable coffees are a combination of objectively fantastic (just plain old good tasting) and then memorable for some other reason: the person you were drinking it with, the setting, the circumstances.

My favorite part of what I do is that it puts me in strange, interesting, sometimes uncomfortable, but always memorable situations. And then it puts coffee in front of me: sometimes mediocre, sometimes amazingly beautiful, sometimes terrible. When the beautiful and the memorable come together, that particular cup of coffee becomes more than the sum of its parts. It's those moments that really make it all worthwhile.

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.

Language and the Brain

On the first day of one of my cupping classes in Harar, I asked the group what they thought was the #1 word Americans use when describing the flavor they desire in Harar coffees. Three people called out, "Blueberry!"

"How many of you have ever tasted a blueberry?" I asked.

Out of sixteen people present, only one hand up, from an exporter who used to live in the United States. So we tasted some blueberries. Later, a few people told me that was the most important moment of the whole class for them.

Whether we have a sense experience of something often determines if we have a word for it. But the opposite is true. Whether we have a word for something often determines if we are even capable of discerning it.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names-not English's light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian's goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that's a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for "in" when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

That's from an article in Newsweek, What's in a Word?

Food for thought for anyone attempting to describe the flavor of a coffee.

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).

Coffee of the Week: An "Interesting" Journey Edition

[Ed. note: This is a post that I wrote over a week ago and tried to post to the blog from Ethiopia. But my connection was so lousy that it got lost in the ether. I think it's a good story though, and ends with a nice coffee, so I'm re-posting it. This is the Coffee of the Week entry for two weeks ago.]

Well Saturday I slept in late and had coffee in bed. I had a shower, a shave with a fresh razor and hot water, and a haircut from a genteel barber with salt-and-pepper hair. I got some fresh band-aids on my annoying minor cuts. I got my shirts all ironed, and I got all my various electronic devices recharged. I had a coke and a sandwich and fries poolside, and another cup of coffee and a Cuban cigar sitting on the balcony and reading The Charterhouse of Parma. I had a right American whiskey (not the counterfeit gasoline stuff that's everywhere in this country) at the hotel bar with some fellow faranji coffee people, and talked to some interesting expatriot Brits. I felt right civilized.

Three days ago, however, I was a bit deeper in the muck. Our trip around Hararge province got bogged down the last two days. Constant rough offroad driving had cost our two vehicles four tires in three days. Then my traveling companion fell ill. It's ironic that it was him and not me... he grew up in this country and I did not. I should be the one with the senstitive foreign stomach. But I think for that reason, I take extra precautions with what I eat and drink; it usually saves me (but, ugh, not always).

Anyway, with my buddy bedridden and miserable, living off of bottled water, rehydration salts and glucose solution, I was left to maunder about in the town of Asebe Tefari for two days. "Asebe Tefari," I'm told means "The Dream of Tefari" or "The Place Tefari Thought About." The Tefari in question here is the famous king Ras Tefari (later the emperor Haile Selassie), from whom the religion Rastafarianism derives its name. Incidentally, the relationship between Jamaicans and Ethiopians is fascinating. To Rastas this is the holy land, the birthplace of God's incarnation. But the Ethiopians themselves seem only vaguely aware of — and often just amused by — the Jamaicans obsessed with their country.

Asebe Tefari is a fine place, but it's not the kind of place you want to get stranded in. Communication is spotty, foreigners stand out like sore thumbs, and there's not much more to eat but goat meat. When my companion decided he was ready to move on to the city of Nazret (Nazereth) and their quality hospital, I was eager.

We drove the few hundred kilometers west to Nazret on a wobbly wheel that barely got us there. In fact, the tire went flat and we were riding on the rim just as we pulled into town. Either really great timing or really horrible timing, depending on your philosophical point of view. I got the spare on the truck with the help of some local kids, then got my friend to the hospital. I spent a few hours around Nazret drinking Coca-Colas and meeting friends. It's much cooler and greener than Asebe Tefari, and seemed cleaner. The "gomista" (tire-fixer) showed me that our tire was completely shot, the threads were splayed and coming undone. So we rotated the spare onto the back (front-wheel drive SUV) and put the "good" tires up front. My friend emerged from the hospital with a prescription and looking a little better and more hopeful.

From there it was just two hours back to Addis Ababa, through the central mountains and then the rather dismal exurban industrial center of Debre Zeit with its black smoke and hundreds of diesel trucks; and finally the chaotic traffic of Addis Ababa itself.

Well, all's well that ends well. My friend is well on his way to total recovery. The car is safely returned to its owners, and I'm here in Addis Ababa in a comfortable room with clean shaves and whiskey and computers and what-not. In fact, I even had a time to have Coffee of the Week.

Yes, on Friday afternoon I visited my friend Rachel Peterson and Daniel Mulu where they were teaching a Q-Grader course for CQI, with Manuel Diaz. (Daniel is an old friend from here in Ethiopia, and Rachel is of the Hacienda la Esmeralda Petersons of Panama — longtime readers will recall I did a cupping event with here famous geisha coffee in New York City a couple years back.) While some students were taking their exams, the staff kindly made me a cup of coffee...

It came in the little demitasse cups that are de rigeur here, and it had a very strange and different taste, and the aroma of gingerbread. Everyone looked at me strangely and asked me what I thought, concealing smiles. I told them in all honesty that I thought it tasted fantastic, but it had a strange taste I couldn't identify.

Turns out they had made the coffee with rue, which is a common practice here. Just a little bit of the stem of the rue plant, broken open to release the flavor, then soaked in the already-brewed coffee for a short while as it cools. A subtle flavor, and very unique. It's like the intersection of ginger, lemongrass, and tea rose, with a slight sweetness to it. In Ethiopia it is called tena adam.

You already know that I normally avoid doctoring my coffee. I take it with two ingredients: water and coffee. But there was something very nice about this little cup of rue-coffee. It was like the capper to a hell of a week, and felt like a well-earned cup of something exotic, sweet, and relaxing.

Rue-infused coffee, safely consumed in the confines of civilization: my Coffee of the Week.

Water, Water, Water

There are so many factors that go into a good cup of coffee that sometimes we forget to pay attention to the main ingredient. No, not coffee. Water.

The water where you live will have a huge impact on the flavor of your coffee. The thing is, if you have lived where you do for a long while, you become inured to your own water. In New York City, the water (from the Hudson River aquifer) is actually quite mineral-heavy. This makes for water that is slightly soapy-tasting and smooth in mouthfeel. Lots of minerals can increase the extraction rate of coffee (that is, make it extract more fully more quickly).

Once I was doing a cupping in a country that shall not be named, and, having received a request for "bottled water" to do the cupping, the man who got the supplies brought in two huge containers of distilled water. Distilled water is basically pure H20, with nothing else inside. Might sound like a good thing, but it's not. If you don't believe me, you can try a little experiment at home. Make one pot of coffee with your tap water, one with some bottled spring water, and one with bottled distilled water. Just be careful to control your other variables, and you can learn a valuable lesson about how water affects taste.

I thought of this post while I was shaving this morning. I use an old-fashioned safety razor (like the baby in the picture) and badger's hair brush with real shaving soap. This method takes a little longer than a can of gel and plastic cartridge razors from the supermarket. But if you do it right, it gives you a much nicer shave. Part of the reason it gives you a better shave is that you are more in tune with the subtleties of the process. You can tell when the blade is sharp and when it needs replacing. You can feel a subtle but definite change in friction when you use a new shaving soap. It even feels different when I spent a lot of time outdoors the previous day versus staying indoors and making coffee.

Anyway, the big change I noticed recently is in the water. In the Seattle area, the water is much cleaner than in New York City. In a way, this makes it harsher. Without those softening minerals in it, it becomes crisp and almost — I know this sounds silly — dry. You notice it when you drink it, and you notice it when you make coffee with it. And you can notice it when you shave. When I pull the razor across my face, it tends to stick and tug more. Not so much that I cut myself, but enough that I feel a touch more raw at the end of the process. In New York, the water tends to add another lubricating layer to your face. In Seattle, it bounces off you like your were a duck.

The great thing about life, and about coffee, is that you will never, ever run out of things to pay attention to. That's the fun of it. There's actually a quality to the climate here that affects coffee quality, but that's another post for another day (anyone want to take a guess what it is?). I might be crazy for thinking about extraction rates when I shave, but I suspect I'm not the only one. Have you ever had an insight into coffee that came from an unexpected source? And what's your water like?

Top 20 Coffees of All Time: The Magenta Orgasm

Talking about my "top twenty coffees of all time" yesterday got me thinking about what, seriously, would be on that list. So I am going to revisit some of those memorable coffees over the coming weeks when the mood strikes me.

The following article appeared on my old, old blog (the LiveJournal one), and my readership has changed quite a bit since then, so I thought it would be fun to repost this. I originally wrote it for the women's website Divine Caroline, so those of you who are coffee experts can forgive the elementary presentation. But I still stand by the general philosophy of this piece. Enjoy!

Papayas, Love Poems, and Magenta Orgasms

COFFEES THAT ARE TRULY ONE OF A KIND

by Daniel Humphries

I’ve got my score sheet right here in front of me. It says, and I am not making this up: “banana, papaya, pineapple, raspberry, mangos... tropical...” (then you can see I am getting a little excited, because my handwriting is more hurried) “so sweet and smooth... astonishing” (then I lose my professionalism altogether): “Velvety pinks and magentas!!”

Would you guess that I was describing coffee? Yeah, me neither. But this is the sort of thing I sometimes come across in my travels: a truly unique coffee. For the skeptical here’s a statistic: brewed coffee typically contains over 800 different organic compounds, compared with around 200 in a glass of wine. Each compound has unique flavor, from the nasty (ashes, mold, animal hide) to the divine (meyer lemon, honey, baker’s chocolate). What marks a great coffee is an intriguing combination of positive attriubtes and a lack of negative ones.

It was in Ethiopia that I found the coffee that caused my little “pink and magenta” orgasm, in the middle of scoring coffees for a national competition. Now, strictly speaking, “velvety pinks and magentas!” is not a technically acceptable term. You might be surprised at the level of detail that goes into scoring these coffees. Coffees are evaluated on flavor, aftertaste, acidity (not always a bad thing!), body, cleanliness (really!), balance, sweetness, fragrance and aroma (not technically the same thing!), and well, you get the idea. If you are interested in what a scoresheet looks like (and if you are interested, my goodness dear, what kind of hopeless nerd are you?!) you can see one version (though not the one I was using) here.

The aroma notes I listed above (papaya, mango) are the kinds of notes professional cuppers will often make on their score sheets, though admittedly those particular notes are quite rare. Writing down colors is less common. It’s supposed to be scientific, after all. Sometimes I have to remind myself. Otherwise I might end up with drawings of race cars for, say, a kick-ass Blue Batak Sumatra; a series of angrily sketched frowny faces for defective commercial coffee from — name redacted to protect the purveyors of defective commercial coffee — ; and Keatsian odes to delicate Guatemalan beauties (“O, thou still unravished Huehuetenango of quietness...”)

Usually, though, I just stick to my numerical scores. I swear. Besides, giving a coffee a 9.5 on aftertase is about the same as writing a love poem to it, considering what that implies about the quality of the coffee.

All this is just to find coffees that people are going to like. Generally we don’t speak of people evaluating their double americanos based on balance and fragrance. But there’s the catch: they are evaluating it that way. They just don’t know it. People know what they like, they just sometimes lack the vocabulary to explain it.

And what do people like? Above all, they like sweetness and a smooth mouthfeel. Market research backs this up. Also: duh. This is why people put cream and sugar (or soy and splenda, natch) in their coffee. People also like a good aftertaste, a pleasing snap (“good” acidity), and an interesting or comforting aroma profile. The fact that they don’t break it down that way doesn’t mean that it can’t be broken down that way.

A truly great coffee will be so sweet and smooth as to not need any cream or sugar or Stevia. (Actually, nothing should ever need Stevia, ever. For any reason. Have you tried that stuff? I don't care if it's "all natural"," it’s like putting the purified essence of the sun on your tongue, if the sun was made out of sugar and post-industrial chemical waste). A truly great coffee will also have something unique about it that no other coffee has, no matter how sweet and smooth.

And this is why we go through all the trouble to taste and score coffee after coffee in the kinds of competitions I’m describing. Trust me, a lot of the coffee is terrible. There are all kinds of defects that can come up on the table. I don’t need to tell you this. You have already had terrible coffee many times. But the search is always worth it. When you find that glittering ruby on the table, you are such a happy little taster.

Lucky for you, dear and beautiful reader, it’s not necessary to go to Ethiopia to find these coffees. Just be discerning. In fact, be a snob. I highly recommend it. If you want to find a coffee like the one that made me start singing arias in Ethiopia, look for coffee that was bought and roasted in small lots or “micro-lots.” Coffee bought at specialty auction is reliably outstanding. Look for “Cup of Excellence” (top coffees from all over Latin America and now Rwanda), “Best of Panama” (top coffees from, um, Panama), “Ethiopia Limited” (where I found my little gem) and the like.

If your favorite roaster or coffee shop doesn’t offer something like this, ask them why not? And as always, let your own taste be your guide. If it makes you want to draw unicorns, it’s good coffee.

(Magenta Square by Nigel Tomm)

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