CAFÉ SIN MENTIRAS – COFFEE CONSULTING
SPECIALTY COFFEE WORKSHOPS AND TRAINING – LISBON AND PORTO
… a phrase I heard earlier this month has been stuck in my head ever since. We were discussing coffee production, the logistics of exporting and importing to Europe, when someone said: “I don’t believe in Q-graders.” It lingered in my mind, not because I’m a Q-grader and it hurt my feelings, but because I … Continue reading “I don’t believe in Q graders…”
Let’s imagine. Sunday morning. You are getting out of bed, craving some coffee. Probably you even have a bag that you bought recently, something that you is gonna be tasty, gonna be soooo good…
The only problem is – no proper water at hand. Only tap water.
To brew or not to brew? A good question…
When brewing coffee, the quality of the water that you use matters.
Looks like in specialty we are always running against the clock, trying to get the freshest green beans first, and then, when the coffee is roasted – well, the idea is to sell it faster, because when you roast it, you basically start the timer. Timer of “not too fresh”.
It comes to a degree when people are refusing to buy coffee that is perfectly fine, but was roasted a week ago. “7 days is too much, probably coffee has already passed its peak”.
But does fresher coffee mean better coffee?
Couple of weeks ago I was invited to do a talk on Sustainability in Coffee at one local food market, and honestly I think I painted a pretty scary picture for those who attended the talk. The truth is I don’t think I exaggerated at all.
If we define the sustainability as “the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources” or “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, we quickly figure out that Coffee Industry as it is functioning now is far from being sustainable.
I have been there myself – not finding the descriptors that were “promised”, but finding other ones. It took me a while to put it all together in my own head, looking from the perspective of the coffee lover and from the other side – of the coffee professional.
The most important questions I will raising and trying to answer here:
Are coffee descriptors set in stone? Is it something that you will taste for sure the way it is described on a coffee bag?
Do we really need flavour descriptors on a bag of coffee? What is it – helpful information or marketing?
How to make it easier for the customer to buy coffee and enjoy it without feeling incompetent or unable to make a good choice?
Hypothesis: the sequence in which you experiment basic solutions makes a difference in how intense is the flavour that you experience of the solution you try the last. Equipment: digital scales (0,01 g) spoon 5 glass/ceramic cups/bowls/glasses spit cup glass for fresh water Materials: clean water with no strong taste (2 ltr) – I used … Continue reading SWEET, SOUR, SALTY, BITTER, UMAMI – flavour interaction experiment
Has it ever happened to you: you are enjoying a really really good cup of coffee, incredibly sweet, delicious. And then you comment with your friend about it, who’s having the same coffee right next to you. Bland, sour, empty, he says. Who is right? Who is wrong?
COVID-19 is currently making some changes in how coffee roasters and coffee shops are operating – and among other things it means that we will see a lot of blends in the next year. Coffee blends can be made with different goals in mind – in order to move the stock of the green coffee, to present your clients with a more budget option, to create a sum of parts (blend components) that is tastier than simply each of the origins separately. Blending can be taken very seriously, to maintain the same taste throughout the year, or can be done to simply sell the coffee that is sitting in the warehouse. Let’s dive deeper into what are the coffee blends, and if there is a place for the in specialty segment.
The deeper you are diving into what’s behind the quality coffee, the more you discover. But with coffee, and specialty coffee, our perception has been going backwards, in other words, not from the product to the cup, but from the bitter drink that we happen to see every day at our tables – to how it is actually being produced. First. And then the next question – where does the quality really happen? Does it come from the coffee preparation? Does it come from coffee roasting? Does it come from the roasting equipment? Does it come from the methods of coffee preparation?
Let me ask you something. You are drinking coffee that you know is picked, carried, processed, dried, with care and dedication, coffee touched by innumerous hands, coffee that has multiple faces – will you really care if it is 80 points, or 83 points, or 85 points, or 87? Will you feel significantly less satisfied?
“Educating” (oh how I hate this word) is about showing how much damn effort goes into each single bean. How much effort it takes to carry those damn canastas. How much effort it takes to pick the cherries. How it is to live as a coffee picker, when you have the job only for the 3-4 months of the year, and then you are forced to move looking for a place to earn extra. With kids. With families.
We have more and more people, professionals, posting about specialty coffee. There are simply more qualified people than ever before, and the industry is growing, we, as industry, are learning something new every day. There is more information than ever before. Diverse. Multi-lingual. Plenty.
But. Seems like 80% of our information is coming from less than 1% of professionals posting. What I want to say… We read more, yes, but we read all the same sources. I bet that there will be just a few coffee professionals that will mention more than 10 daily sources of their relevant coffee information.
Is it true that we are educating ourselves to like or to hate different types of food?
Is it possible that by drinking bad coffee we become less, not more, sensitive to its quality?
Can it be that drinking kombucha makes us more prone to not considering overfermentation in coffee being a defect?
CAFÉ SIN MENTIRAS - COFFEE CONSULTING 