Learning to Taste

Learning to taste coffee, or technically, learning to cup is an involved process of training your senses in all the nuances of coffee. It consists of many intensive exercises to training the palate. Our quality advisors were about to embark on a disciplined journey of taste. They were to be schooled in the exercises of standards, of similarities and of contrasts. Anyone who worked at Starbucks for any length of time was schooled in the art of coffee tasting. It was a romantic ritual which began every meeting, became the focal point of training and taught us the finer points of our product. It taught us that coffee could be more than a beverage. It could be a way to connect, to reminisce, to tell stories. Cupping coffee on the other hand was business. Cupping was about flavor, and quality, and defects, and roast. Cupping coffee is a disciplined routine of evaluation around the flavor characteristics of coffee. It attempts to standardize or instill objectivity into the squishy relativity of taste. Those of us lucky enough to work in supply chain saw the business of cupping, and its place in selecting specialty coffees. Yet, I don't think I ever appreciated what it took to learn the craft. And so, traveling half way round the world, today I spend a morning getting a glimpse into the training of quality advisors. Quality advisors are the folks working with farmers and staff to help them understand what maintains coffee quality and what creates defects. Cupping puts objectivity to the characteristics of taste (sweet, salty, sour and bitter), flavor (chocolate, blueberry, , etc.), aroma (floral, spice, citrusetc.) and body (light, medium, full). Developing a common vocabulary around these paramters and then calibrating the team on those standards is a rigorous practice. First there are the standards. Standards which bear more resemblance to a chemistry experiment than coffee. Small vials with tinctures of vanilla or essence of caramel. And graduated cylinders for precise formulation of solutions with phosphoric acid or glucose.

Next there is the preparation. Time spent describing equipment specification and precise instructions of operation. Plus, the sharing of tips for executing these routines with consistency. It takes a certain kind of person to run a tasting room, and perform the tasks in a flawlessly identical way day after day. Incidentally, that device with a series of chambers is a sieve for separating particle size. Used here for calibrating the coffee grinder, it is borrowed, I might add, from soil science (once again, grad school pays off).

Finally, there's coffee. Dozens of glass cups each with their roasted coffee stand ready to be brewed. Multiple samples per coffee give repeatability to allow for sample variability. Piping hot water, just off boil, is added to the fresh, ground coffee. As the samples steep, each is sniffed for their aroma. Then grounds are removed, and the slurping (and spitting) begins.

Training quality advisors and calibrating palates is a long process. Some experts spend years honing their skills. My brief morning is but a glimpse into their world. It's a world of routine and precision and quality that brings you that fresh cup of coffee every morning.

A Trip to the Wet Mill

High-quality, specialty coffees require special processing for the unique flavor qualities to come through in the cup. One aspect of processing is how the "cherry" pulp on the outside of the bean is removed. Wet-processing is the preferred method for many high quality coffee. In Africa, Kenya has a long history of producing washed coffees. Many other countries do not. This field visit took us to an established wet mill in Kenya.

The process starts with the farmer bringing their ripe (hopefully)cherry to the receiving station. Here, they weigh the load and the farmer gets a receipt for what was delivered.

From there it is dumped into a hopper. All of the hoppers, tanks and conveyance channels are arranged along the slope of a hill. This allows the system to be gravity-fed. With a bit of assistance from water here and there, it all flows down hill.

At the base of the hopper, a grinding machine forces cherries past grinding blades adjusted to strip the pulp and pass the bean. Most cherries contain two beans (except peaberries). The beans pass down these channels while the pulp is carried away for composting (hopefully).

While the pulp is stripped away, a thin layer of mucilage still coats the bean. It's that slippery stuff that prevents you from picking up a tomato seed. In this type of mill, rows of tanks hold the beans while fermentation breaksdown the mucilage.

After standing for the right length of time, the beans are "tested" to see when they are ready. One test involves prodding the heap with a stick to see whether the hole stands up when the stick is removed (sorta like a toothpick in the middle of a cake). Another, rubs beans between your hands to listen for a distinctive rasping sound.

Once "done," the beans are then released into washing channels. In addition to washing, these channels are used to sort tainted beans. Infected beans or those that did not develop properly are less dense, floating to the surface. "Floaters" are washed down the channel, allowed to float over the top of weirs. The denser high-quality beans sink. These beans are agitated counter-current in the channel to leave a clean bean, or parchment.

Parchment is screened at the end of the channel. Wet

parchment is carried to drying beds to air dry on screens in the sun. Dried parchment is then collected up and stored in the warehouse where it is bagged to await shipping.

Nairobi, Kenya

Nairobi is as much a western city as you will find anywhere. From its big city skyline and street-clogged traffic to its cozy restaurants and urban sophistication. With more than its fair share of big city problems, I was warned of crime and violence. I was admonished to take drivers everywhere and don't be out alone after dark. What did I find? Again, Africa surprised me. One the one hand an abandoned estate behind our building had homeless people living in psuedo luxury with overgrown ponds. On the otherhand, I found some creature comforts.

Rwanda's food scene consists of African buffets with rice, plantains, beans, cooked greens and a meat (usually goat). Weekly is fine. Anymore, wears on you. It's short list of fine dining is limited to a pizzeria, the occasional Chinese food and pasta. We survive on the ever-present brochette (kebabs, usually goat) and chips. After more than a few weeks in Rwanda I was ready for big city restaurants. Right about now I could go for a fresh Thai chicken salad and a crisp Pinot Gris served on the patio. And so I did. Simple becomes more delicious when you've been living on the basics. With more than a few trips to the food court of my local mall, I had my fill and could return to the basics.

Besides restaurants, the best thing about Nairobi is the National Park. Situated next to the city and on the jetliner's approach to the airport, it's an amazing expanse of open plains. I can't say as though it felt like wilderness, it was certainly something more than a trip to the zoo. A bit like being mixed in with the animals. Despite the steep fees, cumbersome paperwork and lack of a map, it was still well worth the hassle.

Coffee Grows on Trees

By now you might be justified in asking, Where is the frickin' coffee? He travels half-way round the world in pursuit of coffee and talks about it once. My assignment is working with teams supporting coffee farmers and coops as they grow, harvest, process and bag coffee for export to your local specialty coffee purveyor. This field trip gave me the chance to see coffee trees up close, with coffee cherry. Here it was, the real thing growing in fields surrounding a mill. Coffee "trees" are more of a shrub typically grown some 8 - 10 feet. After rains break the dry season, little white flowers form along the margins of the stems. Soon these become green cherry that ripen in the warm sun of another dry season. In this part of Rwanda two wet-dry cycles occur per year, something about how the trade winds bring moisture inland migrating north towards the equator than back south. This drives two crops. Being in the midst of one of those rainy seasons, during this visit we spot both buds and cherry at all stages of ripening. Cherry takes about 8 months to mature, producing bright red cherry. Each ripens at its own pace, necessitating labor-intensive hand-picking throughout the harvest. As you might expect, under-ripe cherry affects quality in the cup (more on that in a future posting). I enthusiastically accepted the offer to observe agronomy training in person, in the field. Besides seeing coffee growing, I spent time in the classroom and observing hands-on activities in the field. Today was soil nutrition. Talk about good timing, all those years of soil science classes so long ago were about to pay-off! With 15 Extension Farmer Trainers in tow, our instructors explained the particulars of soil pH, macro-nutrients and cation exchange capacity. Such words I had not heard in years, much less their Kinyarwanda equivalent mixed with French. Peripheral topics of mulching and maintenance pruning got their due. A few poor trees took it a little rough during the maintenance portion. In the end, a good time was had by all. But then what would you expect. It was soils class after all.