Tasting Coffee vs. Drinking It

I was about to delete my unnecessarily harsh post about some coffee experiences in L.A. but it continues to generate comments that may be of some help so will leave it up. I'll do my utmost from here on to be more positive and to make sure critical comments are constructive.

Nicholas Cho from Wrecking Ball roasters had a great article in a recent issue of SCAA's Coffee Chronicles that deals with the age-old and hotter-than-ever topic of the tension between coffee connoisseurship and the kind of coffee beverages customers actually drink:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/62935061/Doing-Good-and-Making-Change-Chronicle-Issue-4

My principle passion ever since I first started tasting and roasting good coffee has been to break down the barrier between the cupping room and the retail coffee customer - to give them the opportunity at least to taste the kind of coffees professional tasters take home to drink, rather than the blends and dark roasts that roasters historically have made their money selling. I know that same passion is alive and well among many roasters and baristas in today's specialty coffee community, which is exciting and inspiring. 

Long ago I learned that this kind of education has to start with store staff. One has to make a distinction between tasting coffee, which is a skill one develops primarily to help others, and drinking it, which is for one's own pleasure. Whether one is talking coffee, tea, wine, whatever, the old adage about a connoisseur being someone who can say "that's very good - and I don't like it" needs to be remembered. 

To build confidence in tasting I like to start off with a representative coffee from each of the most important growing regions: a top washed Central American coffee, an excellent Kenya auction lot or perfumey Ethiopian, a Yemen or Ethiopian Harrar and a classic Sumatra or Sulawesi. Back in the day I'd have used a French Press to brew these, but with better technology available would choose a 1 liter Nissan thermos and filtercone setup like this:

or an Aeropress for a small-scale tasting today. While the brewing method is obviously important, I've found over the years that the most important thing to remember in such tastings is to pour the samples into sampling cups kept under one's control and to not permit any tasting until the coffee is barely warm, explaining as one does so that while coffee has to be brewed with very hot water and served piping hot it can only be fully tasted when it has cooled (and our memories of its quality are, often unconsciously, based on the last, best, sip). 

Another tasting which is arguably even more important than the world tour of basic origin-derived flavors above is one I call "the three ways coffee can be strong." For this one the ideal coffees are a light-roasted Kenya, a particularly heavy-bodied Indonesian such as an Aged Sumatra, and the darkest West Coast style French Roast (a Peet's or Starbucks sample with an Agtron well below 20 would be perfect). The coffees are brewed to the exact same strength - say 60 grams per liter in a drip brewer - and once cooled are tasted in the order listed. The revelation for first-timers, obviously enough, is that there is acid strong, body strong, and burnt strong, and of these three they and 99% of consumers have only ever experienced the last iteration of strong.  Not only is this tasting eye-opening, but it makes the taster realize that all the coffee experiences worth having lie well outside the extremes of bland (cinnamon-roasted American canned coffee) and burnt (Starbucks-style dark roasts) that are still pretty much the only readily available choices in the mass market. 

Such tastings give some basic tools to help customers find their way to coffees they'll enjoy, and here it becomes necessary to address the topic of additives. For those who invariably drink their coffee with cream  and sugar why not steer them towards the Vienna-roasted Sumatra that can handle such treatment? I'd no sooner suggest the city-roasted Kenya I prefer to drink to such a customer than I would recommend a delicate green tea to someone who'd grown up with Irish Breakfast. 

Professional cuppers left to their own devices invariably end up doting on ever-more-refined, nuanced, terroir-driven washed coffees, lightly-roasted and recently harvested. Such preferences are a function of habituation, unique levels of access to coffees and - last not least - a professional responsibility to make sure defective (fermented, hard, dirty, etc.) coffees don't make it through the door.

Having had the responsibility myself for ensuring the integrity of high volumes of coffee blends where both consistency of quality and tightly controlled green coffee costs were key requirements, I count myself among those who developed such a strong abhorrence for the flavor defects that plague natural and semi-washed coffees that I gave up on drinking them - and tried to avoid tasting them - for years. Fortunately a good part of this time I was required to visit multiple Starbucks retail stores on a daily basis rather than holing up in the cupping room as I'd have preferred, and invariably when I did so I found our most seasoned employees and longest-time customers waxing eloquently about the joys of a particularly blueberry-like Ethiopian Harrar from two years past, or asking me when the Yemen Mocha or Aged Sulawesi would be back in stock. 

The catholicity of taste and the appetite for fruit and funk of the folks running the retail stores and the customers paying the bills helped to keep me in line - something that unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case with the buyers for some of today's Third Wave roaster-retailers, many of whom only offer 3-4 manicured washed coffees as their entire single origin selection. I wish such folks would have the full courage of their convictions and simply ban milk and sugar from their stores. While they're at it, they could do the cause of terroir an even bigger flavor and yank the commercial espresso machine from the store, since that brewing method, by design,  uses pressurized extraction and concentration to optimize the flavor of mediocre-to-awful coffees and simply isn't a suitable vehicle for experiencing the nuances of great ones (or to put it more simply, quoting Ric Rhinehart: "there's only one problem with an espresso machine: espresso comes out of it."). 

Bad jokes and Swiftian modest proposals aside, what does seem to me to be critical is doing everything we can to get the pure taste of origin coffee into the mouths of consumers, to give them an opportunity to taste, be thrilled by, and support quality and uniqueness of flavor. Clearly there's no reason for farmers to labor to provide coffees with subtleties of flavor and aroma that won't be perceived by the consumer anyway due to blending, over-roasting and the like, and we (and they) are facing overwhelming odds given the dumbing down of specialty coffee going on at the hands of Starbucks, Green Mountain K Cups, instants and the like. 

I think there's an excellent case to be made for banning blends and dark roasts altogether from one's offerings, and for championing single origins loudly in one's drip strength offerings as well as offering a staple or rotating series of single origin espressos, while scaling back the size of espresso drinks to as close to the classic Italian 5-6 ounce cup as commercial survival will allow, in hopes of getting at least a modest percentage of one's customers to actually taste the coffee in the drink.