Today at the roastery we had a very interesting cupping. We had pulled out a sample from the roast every minute, starting five minutes in and ending at around 15 minutes. This is not a particularly new idea – full credit to Tom at Sweet Marias. His video of it here is worth watching, especially as I am not really going to talk too much about how each bowl tasted.
Posts Tagged ‘cupping’
Cupping: From Raw to Ready
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010Cupping Vs French Press
Thursday, November 4th, 2010I like cupping coffees, especially delicious ones. I am occasionally guilty of liking a coffee so much that I swipe the bowl after we’re done for drinking. This is obviously a disgusting and shameful habit, but hey – tasty is tasty.
Cupping is something that occupies a constant pocket of my mind – the process, the purpose, the results and everything in between. Like many people who often fall in love with coffees on the cupping table I also like full immersion brewing a lot. Often that means the french press. (more…)
Things I don’t understand #3214
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
I am not particularly ashamed of the phrase “I don’t know” but there comes a point in the day when you’ve said it five or six times and you feel you really ought to do something about it.
The cause of my embarrassed ignorance: the change in flavour when coffee cools.
Return of the Uber
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010For a while all has been quiet on the Uber front. We shuffled some stuff around at the roastery, and as part of it we chose not to cut the old Uber into the new worktops as we planned to upgrade – the new Uber having a different (smaller) cutout.
The new Uber arrived today and I am very excited. This probably could have been a post for the Square Mile Blog, but there are many more exciting/important things to post on there!
What’s different about this Uber? The capacity is bigger. We sometimes used the old one for cupping, but it had more of a cafe use/quick recovery capacity so couldn’t do many bowls. This one has a 6 litre boiler – very exciting! This one has a flow control dial, instead of an button control. It also has some beta software for us to test out.
I missed the Uber when it was gone. My brewed coffee consumption dropped (a bad thing). My experimentation also dropped off a little (also a bad thing). I hope to get that going again. I also grew irrationally annoyed with kettles (a weird thing?).
Before anyone accuses me of spam (perhaps fairly) I should make clear that we don’t make any money from the sale of Uber boilers, though yes – they are now available for sale. It is just a project that we’re really excited about and it has been, and will be, a great tool for exploring coffee. We’re extremely grateful to Marco – they are splendid!
8 steps to develop your coffee palate
Friday, October 16th, 2009This post is really for coffee consumers who want to develop their palates, which leads to coffee becoming more enjoyable.
I had been in coffee well over a year before I really began to develop my vocabulary and descriptive skills, and that is probably more embarrassing as I had done some work in wine beforehand.
What does the coffee professional have access to, that the consumer doesn’t, that allows them to progress so fast? It isn’t cupping bowls, or spoons. It isn’t scoresheets, or large amounts of data about where the coffee is from. It is regular opportunities for comparative tasting. (more…)
Thoughts after a public cupping
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
I’ve really enjoyed the discussion going on after this post. One comment that stuck in my mind was Aldo’s Fazenda Kaquend COE Vs Maxwell House experiment. It definitely affected some decisions I made when I was choosing coffees to take with me to a public cupping I did in East London as part of a charity fund raiser.
I knew I would have two separate groups, of between 10 and 20 people each time. I had agreed to do a cupping, rather than a tasting of brewed coffee (which I would prefer to do with the general public usually), because they were paying for a bit more of an experience.