workshop review, “you wanna taste some acid?”
Whatcha drinking?
Today we are drinking a coffee from a region that we find to be under-represented within the specialty coffee sector: Sulawesi. If you have never heard of or tried this region, we wouldn’t blame you. Or if you have heard of it, it may have been through an experience at Starbucks. In a blog post by Thompson Owen of Sweetmarias (a green coffee supplier), it is stated that “The demand for Sulawesi also has something to do with Starbucks, and maybe Peets (Dutch colonial roots?) Starbucks has featured Toraja coffee for many years, as the dark roast style and Indonesian wet-hulled process pair well.” The same blog also speaks to Sulawesi’s complex market history. This specific region of Indonesia has a similar reputation as other regions (such as Sumatra) as being rank and musty in smell, due to it being traded wet. Yet, when processed and traded with care can be clean, tasty, and among some of the loveliest-tasting coffees in Indonesia's growing region.
The cup that we are enjoying today has a lovely complexity to it, and Sweetmarias states this:
Although the system of trading the wet coffee before final drying can damage the cup, we have been able to work with suppliers who have mastered the elaborate coffee-collector system in the Toraja highlands. The result is a brighter, more complex, and cleaner cup flavor.
We have been brewing this one with a lower brew temp of ~85 C, using the Aeropress with the Prismo attachment and heavy agitation. Our goal when brewing this coffee is a high TDS & EY % achieved in a fast brew time. We have had the privilege of serving this coffee at our Sunday cafe takeovers at Boycott Coffee. It will be available for the final time on December 11th, so be sure to stop by and try it for yourself!
Onto the show TITLE READING
Today we are going to review some of the conversation points from our most recent workshop.
If you were there and got the chance to go hands-on with us, thank you again! In case you missed it, be sure to keep up with us on Instagram in order to stay in the know of upcoming events.
This workshop was slightly different from previous ones, as we spent the most time we have ever spent diving hands-on into sensory development. This was achieved by having attendees do several things. We started with a sort of palate calibration, where we cupped five basic tasting elements. This was done by taking citric acid, monosodium glutamate, salt, sugar, and caffeine to allow us to observe are five senses in isolation. The citric acid gave us a sensation of sourness, whereas the MSG gave us an idea of what umami tastes like (it also tasted like a lot of take-out food we have had). The salt and sugar gave us saltiness and sweetness. Finally, the caffeine powder gave us a sense of what bitterness can act like on our palates, this one was far more of a mouth-drying textural element than the other elements and was not as offensive as one might have expected. Why did we choose to start with this? We have found that by having a solid understanding and reference point for these five main senses, we can have further clarity in our coffee-cupping and brew-tasting experiences. While it is convenient for us to say that a said coffee tastes similar to chocolate, what is the actual sensory neuron being activated to make us say such as thing? Is it sweet? Or is it like dark chocolate and instead a bitter taste? While most of us have tasted and had sensory exposure to chocolate, what if we had not? This would be (and still is) rather subjective. Instead of a hyper-specific connection to food, using just the five tastes is a way to level the playing field.
Yet, this is just a starting point. Those specific tastes that we call upon are important too, but not for now.
Next, we had our attendees taste something that was new to us as well! Dante jokingly got everyone’s attention the entirety of the day by asking, “Hey, you wanna try some acids?”
We acquired three food-safe organic acids (lactic, malic, and tartaric) and added them to water in order to isolate them and detect the differences. While they all were sour and acidic by nature, they all had slight differences and varied in complexity. We see that malic acid is the most present in apples, and the water-acid solution we formulated tasted just like apple juice. It was the most acidic of the samples and certainly the sourest and sweet. The tartaric acid, which is post-present and familiar to us in grapes, was milder by comparison, and the majority of those who tasted it declared it as their preference of the three. Our final isolated acid, lactic, was by far the softest in the texture of them all, as well as the most pleasant to sample in this set-up. We find lactic acid most present in dairy products (though the one we used was a non-dairy derivative) such as sour cream, yogurt, and cheese. Lactic acid is also noticeable in many other fermented foods like wine, sourdough, and kombucha.
The purpose of isolation for this set of hands-on was similar reason to the first. Many of us are familiar with using our memorized tastes and call upon them when we taste coffee. Since coffee is a fruit, many times it shares the same organic acids that the fruits we are familiar with. So when we taste a coffee that reminds us of an apple, it could be that the coffee has similar levels of malic acids as a real apple would. Or perhaps we taste a coffee that is nice and fermented in taste, and even resembles a nice rich wine - this could be due to the lactic acid levels. We found that tasting the acids in isolation helps us map our palate to remember the specific acids rather than just the specific foods we are used to using as a reference point.
Again, this is important because it helps level the playing field. Perhaps we have never had a yuzu because we live somewhere where this sort of fruit is not available. Yet, without ever having to taste a foreign fruit, we have this sort of baseline understanding of the organic acid that those sorts of fruits may contain, thus giving us a clearer understanding of what we are tasting.
To wrap this portion of organic acid tasting, we brewed a large batch of coffee using a high ratio. We brewed 40g of coffee using 800g of water, which creates a high ratio of 1:20. We used this ratio as a means of diluting the coffee so that we could split the brew and add each acid to 150 ml of our brewed coffee. If we had brewed at a lower ratio, even a normal ~1:16 it could have interfered with how the acid reacted in the coffee. Having tasted just the acids in water first we could see how it reacted when mixed with coffee, and even brought out more complexity in the perceived acids we were tasting.
For our final hands-on section of the workshop, we moved to cup actual coffee.
This part was done differently than normal yet again. Having calibrated our palates to both our five senses and some organic acid detection, we now were able to proceed with cupping with a clearer understanding of what to pay attention to on our palates. As a way to test our abilities, we decided to cup via triangulation. This is a fancy term for a simple practice, at least in set-up and theory. With set up three cupping bowls, but only used two coffees. Two bowls had an identical region added, and one was different. We chose coffees that were quite different in the region, yet shared a resemblance in their profile, as a means to make it more challenging. For the two identical bowls, we used a washed Ethiopia Guji. This coffee is unlike most from this region, low in fruitiness and acidity and rich in texture and floral. The other coffee we used was a washed Guatemala Tecpan. This high-elevation Guatemala tastes so much like an Ethiopian coffee that it has fooled many who have tried it! This made the triangulation all trickier. In fact, for those of us who set up the bowls, it caused doubt as to which was which since they were so similar.
This method of cupping is used by those who are preparing to test for their Q-grader certification, and it is far more challenging than it sounds. However, after calibrating our palates first it was far less gradient than if we had chosen to jump straight in.
Conclusion
We have been speaking about the importance of cupping coffee for quite a while now, you could even say we have a bit of a fixation on it.
However, cupping coffee is but part of the tasting experience. If we want to have clearer, refined tasting experiences, we must practice. Performing calibrations such as the ones we did in our recent workshops are great starting points, but there is still more to be explored.
To taste “better” then we encourage you to taste firstly with intention. Devise your own methods of calibration and explore different tastes that you have yet to. Think about what is underneath those generic tastes, such as an apple's taste being comprised heavily of malic acid. Setting up intense tasting trials is a fun way to grow, but it can start with simply taking the time to think about the everyday foods that you consume.
Be sure to join us at our next workshop to get in on the experience and conversation!
Until next time.