4    TASTING IT

What to taste for
The cupping ritual demystified
Grace notes and ambiguities

 

 

 

Learning to distinguish roast is a first, relatively simple step in learning to taste and buy coffee expressively. Once we move from distinguishing roast to discrimination among coffees by country or region of origin, we enter a more ambiguous realm. Signs, brochures, and web sites bombard us with light and full bodies; mellow, acidy, bright, and distinctive flavors; rich and pungent aromas; and on into the mellow, full-bodied tropical sunset.

Most stores carry fifteen to thirty varieties of single-origin coffee, all of which have to be described somehow on a sign or brochure or package. Web sites may carry even more coffees. By the middle of the list, you sense a certain strain; by the end, the writer sounds desperate: “stimulating and vibrant,” writes one; “an exotic coffee with a lingering aftertaste, full-bodied and provocative,” writes another; “stands apart in its own special way,” adds still another. Perhaps. Is the emperor wearing his new clothes? Do these coffees really taste different?

They do and they do not. Broad differences stand out on a coffee-educated palate as clearly as do sugar and salt. It would be difficult for even a half-trained palate to mistake a Kenya for a Sumatra, for example, or a Yemen for a Guatemala. On the other hand, subtler differences can be striking but are difficult to communicate and, above all, may not be consistent from crop year to crop year or from farm to farm. No sane coffee professional would pretend, for example, to be able to consistently describe the difference beteween a Guatemala Antigua and a Guatemala from another part of the country, or between an estate Costa Rica and an estate Panama, or even, as was clear in a recent scandal in which Panama and Costa Rica coffees were sold in place of Hawaii Kona, between a Panama, a Costa Rica, and a Hawaii Kona.

Coffee Language, Coffee Clichés

The problem is twofold and has to do with communication. First, the public does not understand coffee language—that is, does not associate terms in brochures with sensations in the mouth. Second, in their effort to make every coffee sound absolutely different from every other coffee, copy writers often resort to mealymouthed romanticisms and wine label clichés in place of genuine description.

The comedian George Carlin once pointed out that there is no name for the two little ridges under the nose. The world is full of unnamed phenomena, and the closer we get to the heart of what it means to be alive, the more unnameable things become. The subtle differences in flavor and aroma among coffees are as real as the chair you are sitting in, but the words do not exist to describe them. We sling a word at a flavor and feel like a Sunday painter trying to capture a misty morning with a tar brush. So we are back to the same old refrain: The only thing to do is taste.

Less Than Specific

Coffee tasting is in many ways more crucial to buying quality coffee than wine tasting is to buying quality wine. The reason: Wine is labeled fairly specifically, whereas coffee is labeled vaguely. For instance, we can learn from its label that a given wine is from France, a country; from Beaujolais, a region; and from Moulin-à-Vent, a village in Beaujolais whose vineyards produce a particularly sturdy and rich red wine. Finally, the bottle tells us what year the grapes were grown and the wine bottled.

Suppose, however, that we buy a coffee from Ethiopia. More than likely it will simply be labeled Ethiopia or Ethiopian. This tells us nothing and would be analogous to simply labeling all wines from France, from the cheapest everyday wine to aged Lafite-Rothschild, as French.

Some specialty roasters might go further and label a coffee Ethiopia Harrar. Harrar, like Beaujolais, is a region or market name, so we are getting closer. But few spcialty roasters will tell us more. Only occasionally are we told what plantation, estate, cooperative, or village a coffee comes from, for example, even though this may be the most important piece of information of all. Nor are we told when the coffee was harvested or how long the coffee was held in warehouses before roasting.

So a wine book can be much more specific in its recommendations than can a coffee book, not only because wine labels are themselves more specific, but also because coffee is a continuous work in progress, a collaborative endeavor involving creative and crucial contributions from many individuals, starting with the grower, moving from there to the mill operator, the exporter, the importer, the roaster and blender, and finally, the consumer who actually brews the beverage.

A bottle of wine can be affected by how it is stored, transported, and handled, but the fact remains that it is bottled and ready to be enjoyed (at however remote a date) when it leaves the winery. Coffee is subject to three crucial operations—roasting, grinding, and brewing—by parties who are thousands of miles away from the tree on which the bean originated. Thus, coffee even from the same crop and estate may taste different after having been subjected to the tastes of different roasters and a variety of grinding and brewing methods.

A Few More Imponderables

Furthermore, conditions in growing countries change in ways beyond the control of any roaster or importer. A coffee from a certain heretofore reliable estate, cooperative, region, or even country may become unavailable or suddenly deteriorate in quality, sending a buyer scurrying for a substitute that may be sold under the same name as the now unavailable original.

Finally, there is always the question of whether a coffee actually is a Sumatra Mandheling, or a Yemen Mattari, or a Jamaica Blue Mountain. Particularly with high-priced coffees, a temptation exists at every step, from the exporter to the importer to the roaster, to substitute lower-priced or more readily available coffees for those represented in signs and brochures. Or, as may be the case with Jamaica Blue Mountain, to expand the definition of Blue Mountain to include lower-grown coffees that would not have merited that designation ten or twenty years ago. Thus, coffee thrusts the consumer into a more active, and possibly more satisfying, role than does wine but frustrates those who might prefer memorizing to tasting.

LEARNING TO TASTE

For all of these reasons, anyone interested in coffee must learn to taste. There is no traditional tasting ritual for the lay coffee drinker as there is for the wine drinker. Professional tasters, or “cuppers” as they are called, slurp coffee loudly off a spoon, roll it around in their mouths, and spit it into a bucket, which is not common afterdinner behavior. I suggest when you are tasting that you make coffee in your ordinary way, sample the aroma, taste some black, and then enjoy it. If you normally add cream and/or sugar, do so after the first sampling.

You may well want to compare samples of various coffees at the same sitting, however, so you have an idea of what coffee terminology actually describes. Remember that dark roasting mutes or eliminates distinctions in flavor, so make certain you taste coffees that have been roasted to traditional North American taste: medium to medium–dark brown, with a dry or vaguely slick bean surface. It is best to buy all of your samples from the same supplier, so that your palate will not be confused by differences in style of roast. You can either make individual samples with a small French press pot or a one-cup filter cone, or brew the way professional cuppers do. In either case, use the same amount of each coffee, ground the same and brewed identically.

I suggest you start with three coffees: a good Costa Rica Tarrazu (if possible a La Minita Estate Tarrazu); a Kenya AA, and a Sumatra Mandheling or Lintong.

The Professional Cupping Ritual

If you want to proceed as professional cuppers would, assemble identical clean cups or shallow, wide-mouthed glasses (capacity 5 to 6 ounces) for each coffee to be sampled; a soup spoon with a round bowl; a glass of water in which to rinse the spoon between samplings; and something to spit into.

Put one standard measure (2 level teaspoons) of each coffee to be sampled, freshly and finely ground, in each cup; pour 5 to 6 ounces of not-quite-boiling water over each sample. Some of the grounds will sink to the bottom of the cup, and some will form a crust on the surface of the coffee.

Wait a couple of minutes for the coffee to steep, then test each coffee for aroma. Take the spoon and, leaning over the cup, break the crust. Virtually stick your nose in the coffee, forget your manners, and sniff. The aroma will never be more distinct than at this moment. If you want to sample the aroma a second time, lift some of the grounds from the bottom of the cup to the surface and sniff again.

After you have broken the crust, most of the grounds should settle to the bottom of the cup. Use the spoon to scoop up froth and whatever grounds remain floating on the surface and dump them into the improvised spittoon. Top off the cup with fresh hot water. Now take a spoonful of each coffee, lift it to a point just below your lips, and suck it violently into your mouth while taking a breath. The purpose is to spray coffee all over your tongue while drawing it into your nasal passages in order to experience a single, comprehensive jolt of flavor.

Top, coffee sample prepared for cupping. Bottom, Minabu Fujita cupper at work, Hawaii.

This inhaling of coffee spray should give you a notion of the nose of the coffee or the pure aromatic elements of its flavor. Now roll the mouthful of coffee around your tongue, bounce it, chew it even. This exercise should give you a sense of both the body or mouth-feel of the coffee, as well as its flavor as influenced by both aromatics and fundamental tastes, particularly sweetness and acidity. Also note how the sensation of the coffee develops after the first impression. Note whether it changes and deepens, or whether it becomes weaker or flatter; whether it sweetens and softens or hardens. After all this, spit out the coffee, noting the aftertaste.

Continue this procedure until you can distinguish the qualities I discuss in the following pages. Take your time, and feel free to simply take mouthfuls and experience them without the often distracting inhaling business. It is a good idea to concentrate successively on each of the broad, tasting categories: taste all three samples for acidity; then taste all three for body; then for flavor and finish; and finally for aftertaste. Always continue to taste as the coffee cools. Some characteristics reveal themselves most clearly at room temperature. If your palate becomes jaded or confused, sip some water or nibble on a bit of unsalted soda cracker.

COFFEE-TASTING WORDS AND CATEGORIES

Whether you taste the coffees after brewing them as you usually do, or set up a little cupping exercise along the lines I just described, here are some words and concepts that may help you feel your way into the rich and complex sensory world of fine coffee.

Acidity

Taste those high, thin notes, the dryness the coffee leaves at the back of your palate and under the edges of your tongue? This pleasant tartness, snap, or twist, combined with an underlying sweetness, is what coffee people call “acidity.” It should be distinguished from sourness or astringency, which in coffee terminology means an unpleasant sharpness. The acidy notes should be very clear, powerful, and transparent in the Costa Rica; rich and wine- or berry-toned in the Kenya; and deeper-toned and muted in the Sumatra. They should be drier in the Costa Rica and perhaps a bit sweeter in the Kenya. Robustas and some lower-grown arabica coffees may display virtually no acidity whatsoever and consequently taste flat.

You may not run into the terms acidity or acidy in your local coffee seller’s signs and brochures. Many retailers avoid describing a coffee as acidy for fear consumers will confuse a positive acidy brightness with an unpleasant sourness. Instead you will find a variety of creative euphemisms: bright, dry, sharp, brisk, vibrant, etc.

An acidy coffee is somewhat analogous to a dry wine. In some coffees the acidy taste actually becomes distinctly winy; the winy taste should be relatively clear in the Kenya. In promotional tags you may find the tones that I call winy described with other terms: fruity, dry fruit, and various specific fruit names, particularly berry and black current. The main challenge is to recognize the fundamental complex of fruit and winelike sensations; once you do that, you can call them anything you like.

Body, Mouth-feel

Body, or mouth-feel, is the sense of heaviness, tactile richness, or thickness when you swish the coffee around your mouth. It also describes texture: oily, buttery, thin, etc. To cite a wine analogy again, cabernets and certain other red wines are heavier in body than most white wines. In this case wine and coffee tasters use the same term for a similar phenomenon. All of the sample coffees I recommend should have relatively substantial body; either the Costa Rica or the Sumatra will be the heaviest, and the Kenya—usually a medium-bodied coffee—the lightest. In terms of texture or mouth-feel, the Sumatra may display the most interest—perhaps an oily or gritty sensation. But avoid inventing something you fail to taste. None of these coffees will be thin-bodied or anemic.

Aroma

Strictly speaking, aroma cannot be separated from acidity and flavor. Acidy coffees smell acidy, and richly flavored coffees smell richly flavored. Nevertheless, certain high, fleeting notes are reflected most clearly before the coffee is actually tasted. There is frequently a subtle floral note to some coffee that is experienced most clearly in the aroma, particularly at the moment the crust is broken in the traditional tasting ritual. Of the three coffees I recommend for your tasting, you are most likely to detect these fresh floral notes in the Kenya; but depending on the roast and freshness of the coffee, you could experience it in any of the three samples. Latin-American coffees brought to a medium roast, like the Costa Rica, may display a sweet vanilla-nut complex in aroma. The Sumatra also may exhibit smoky, pungent, earthlike, or spicy notes. Finally, if your Costa Rica is a La Minita, the aroma should have a sort of echoing, resonant depth to it. The same should be true of the Kenya, whereas you may find that the aromatic sensations of the Sumatra are rather immediate and limited, without a sense of dimension opening behind and around them.

Finish

If aroma is the overture of the coffee, then finish is the resonant silence at the end of the piece. Finish is a term relatively recently brought over into coffee tasting from wine connoisseurship. It describes the immediate sensation after the coffee is spit out or swallowed. Some coffees develop in the finish—they change in pleasurable ways. All three of the sample coffees I recommend should develop in the finish. I would predict that the pungent tones of the Sumatra may soften toward cocoa or chocolate in the finish, and the dry wine or berry tones of the Kenya turn sweeter and fruitier.

Flavor

Flavor is a catch-all term for everything we do not experience in terms of the categories of acidity, aroma, and body. In another sense, it is a synthesis of them all. Some coffees simply display a fuller, richer flavor than others, are more complex, or more balanced, whereas other coffees have an acidy tang, for instance, that tends to dominate everything else. Some are flat, some are lifeless, some are strong but monotoned. We also can speak of a distinctively flavored coffee, a coffee whose flavor characteristics clearly distinguish it from others.

The following are some terms and categories often used to describe and evaluate flavor. Some are obvious, many overlap, but all are useful.

Richness. Richness partly refers to body, partly to flavor, at times even to acidity. The term describes an interesting, satisfying fullness.

Range. This is one of my favorite tasting concepts. Imagine that the sensations evoked by a mouthful of coffee are a musical chord. Then take note of the range—where the main interest and complexity of sensation are concentrated. The Kenya will have great complexity throughout, but particularly in the higher ranges, the equivalent of treble notes. The Sumatra, if it is a good one, will be very complex in the lower ranges, the equivalent of bass notes. The Costa Rica will be more integrated and total, perhaps with sensation more concentrated in the middle range.

Complexity. I take complexity to describe flavor that shifts among pleasurable possibilities, tantalizes, and does not completely reveal itself at any one moment; a harmonious multiplicity of sensation. The Kenya is probably most complex; if the Sumatra is a good one, it may also be complex, though perhaps less balanced. If the Sumatra is not a particularly good one, it may feel hard and monotoned on the palate. The Costa Rica is probably more like a singular bellcap—perfect, resonant, contained, and complete.

Balance. This is a difficult term. When tasting coffees for defects, professional tasters use balance to describe a coffee that does not localize at any one point on the palate; in other words, it is not imbalanced in the direction of some one (often undesirable) taste characteristic. As a term of general evalutation, balance appears to mean that no one quality overwhelms all others, but there is enough complexity in the coffee to arouse interest. It is a term that on occasion damns with faint praise. The Costa Rica sample should be most balanced, although it probably has less idiosyncrasy to balance than the other two coffees. The Kenya should be both complex and balanced; the Sumatra may be imbalanced by overbearing pungent tones and may be a bit rough.

Varietal Distinction or Character

If a coffee displays characteristics that both set it off from other coffees yet identify it as what it is, it has varietal distinction. In one sense, all of our three samples are distinctive, because they probably embody the best and most characteristic traits of the growing region from which they came. In another sense the Kenya and the Sumatra could be seen as more distinctive than the Costa Rica simply because the Costa Rica embodies what for North Americans is a normative coffee taste, whereas the Kenya and Sumatra display characteristics that set them off from that norm. The rich, winy acidity of the Kenya immediately suggests that it is an East Africa coffee, probably a Kenya. The Sumatra may be less dinstinctive, but it also may, depending on how it was handled after picking, exhibit pungency or mustiness or earthiness, all (hopefully) combined with a softening sweetness. On the other hand, it would be difficult to distinguish the Costa Rica La Minita conclusively from other high-quality, high-grown Central America coffees except in its power and perfection.

BAD TASTES, GOOD TASTES: FLAVOR TAINTS

How the fruit is removed from the coffee beans and how they are dried dramatically affects how the coffee finally tastes in the cup. Among professionals and aficionados there are two schools of thinking (or tasting) in regard to how fruit removal and drying should affect coffee flavor.

Clean Cuppers. One school, whom I call “clean cuppers,” feels that fruit removal and drying should not affect taste in any way and should be as transparent and unobtrusive as possible. This school of thinking prefers that all coffees be wet-processed, meaning that the fruit is removed from the bean immediately after picking so that it does not affect the taste of the bean, and the drying is done as decisively and cleanly as possible. If the wet-processing is conducted with care and precision, and the drying is impeccable, the coffee will taste clean, bright but cleanly sweet, without murky ambiguities. For this school, any deviation from this clean, transparent cup, in other words, any taste characteristic that is added to the coffee through some idiosyncrasy of fruit removal or drying, is called a taste defect.

Romance Cuppers. For these coffee folks certain flavor taints and twists given the bean by deviations from the orthodox wet method of fruit removal and drying may be desirable. “Romance cuppers” consider coffee a product of culture as well as nature, and feel that various taste twists and taints given coffee by traditional ways of removing fruit from the bean are part of the full expression of coffee and worthy of attention and enjoyment.

The origin of the earthy taste in some Sumatra coffees: Freshly pulped coffee beans dry directly on the clay in front of a farmer’s house in the Mandheling region of Sumatra. This practice is atypical. Most Sumatra coffee is dried on tarpaulins rather than directly on clay.

Specific Flavor Taints and Defects

Here are some of the more common (and controversial) flavor taints given coffee by deviations in fruit removal and drying.

Soft or Sweet Ferment. Often the sugars in the coffee fruit begin to ferment before the fruit is removed from the bean, and the fermented taste is transferred to the bean. (This inadvertent fermentation needs to be distinguished from the controlled kind of fermenting that is used to remove fruit residues from the beans during wet-processing and which, properly conducted, does not negatively affect taste.) Soft ferment often gives a vaguely rotten taste to the cup, as though you had stuck the beans in the compost for a while before brewing them. This rotten taste can range from a slight, not entirely unpleasant undertone, to flat-out barnyard nasty.

If this sort of composty ferment is intense, it is considered a flavor defect by both clean cuppers and romantics, but with some coffees it may be tolerated as part of a larger positive taste package. A slight fermented, composty tone haunts all Yemen Mocha coffees, for example, but most cuppers tolerate or even enjoy this taste in the context of the remarkable spectrum of complex fruit tones in Yemens. Similarly, some Central America and Colombia coffees may be pleasantly fruity, but the fruit tones may “flirt with ferment,” as my colleague Mane Alves of Coffee Lab International says. We may tolerate this hint of ferment for the sake of the rich fruitiness that comes with it.

Hard, Musty, or Moldy Ferment. If various microorganisms enter the coffee during inadvertent ferment, the taste imparted to the affected beans can be hard, harsh, medicinal, pondy, or moldy. Personally, I do not like hard ferment, whereas I tolerate some soft, sweet ferment. To my palate the hard or harsh tones blot out other positive flavor characteristics, whereas ferment that is sweet tends to allow other characteristics of the coffee to continue to flourish.

Other coffee lovers are quite tolerant of hard ferment, and may even like it. The most extreme example of this difference in attitude are conflicting reactions to the medicinal tasting coffees of Brazil. North American coffee drinkers typically dislike the harsh, iodinelike taste of these coffees, whereas coffee drinkers in parts of the Middle East and Eastern Europe value the taste and are willing to pay a premium for such tainted coffees.

Closer to home (and to our tasting exercise), your Sumatra sample may embody a hard, musty taste, something like the odor of old shoes left in a damp closet. Many American coffee drinkers enjoy this taste and consider it part of the attractive character of Sumatras. Some of the current versions of aged coffees, considered a delicacy by some sophisticated coffee drinkers, carry a hard, musty pungency into the cup along with the pleasing heaviness of the aged profile.

Earthiness. If coffee is dried on earth, rather than on dirt-free concrete, stone, brick, or wood, the coffee will pick up a distinct earth taste. Again, some consider any earthy taste whatsoever a flavor defect, whereas others enjoy earthiness and consider it an idiosyncratic delicacy. A Brazilian farmer I know supplies coffee to a Japanese buyer who insists that he dry coffee for him every year on earth patios to obtain the earthy tones his customers admire.

Your Sumatra sample may be earthy. The taste is easy to recognize: the odor of fresh earth carried into the cup. A few aficionados even go as far as to distinguish between various kinds of earth taste: red earth (Brazils), yellow clay (some Sumatras), and so on. For my part, I enjoy some earthiness in coffees like Sumatras if the earth taste is sweet, free of the hardness imparted by micoorganisms.

Greenness, Astringency. This taint presents itself as absence of sweetness and a thin, vegetal tone to the cup. It is not a dramatic taint, but no one has anything good to say about it. It is caused by the coffee fruit having been picked too soon, before the fruit is fully ripe and sweet and the sugars fully developed in the bean. It is not a typical taint in any of the three coffees I recommend you taste, although it could turn up in the Sumatra as a background lack of sweetness.

A Final Exhortation

With coffee, the dialogue between palate and product is truly global in nature, more so than almost any other beverage. It reaches from our brewing apparatus through roasting rooms into the heart of mountain remoteness and exotic cultures. It as much a dialogue with culture and history as with a beverage. Learning to enjoy coffee’s range of sensory possibility and the remarkable collaboration between culture and nature it embodies is one of those acts of knowledge and connoisseurship that is as pleasurable in the act of learning as it is in the reward of understanding.