I just got done a morning of cupping 24 coffees! That's a whole lot of caffeine. Needless to say, I'm jacked. I tried some very good SHG natural Bourbons and some really flavorful SHG mechanical-washed Bourbons. Some solid 87's on the tables. For those of you who none of what I just said made any sense, don't worry there is a great place to go to learn about those processes. Visit Cuatro M Cafes website, it is actually very interesting and informative. 87 is a pretty high score when you're talking specialty coffee; 90+ is really few and far between. A coffee must score above a 79 to be considered specialty grade, and most coffee sold as specialty falls somewhere around an 82 I would say.
As I mentioned in my last post, I'll be cupping through the entire warehouse while I'm here. That's basically everything that has been harvested so far this year, starting in October. In addition, I'll be cupping coffees just coming off the patios (about 10 a day right now), and yield samples from other farmers. Let me break down the process of what all that means.
When the coffee is harvested from the trees, they typically pick in one particular spot for the day. These spots are known as LOTS, or TABLONS in El Salvador. A plantation is usually divided up into many lots. A lot being at a particular elevation, position from the sun, soil composition, etc. A MICRO-LOT is an even smaller division of these lots. Different lots on a plantation produce different results in the quality and flavor of coffee across the same varietal due to many factors. To sum up all of these bio agricultural factors let's borrow a word from the wine world: TERRIOR. The terrior is what makes a lot of coffee unique from the others.
A good coffee farmer will pick from one lot at a time, and keep these lots separated. Though they often get mixed together as well. When a truck load of cherries arrive at the Cuatro M mill a 200 gram sample is taken to be processed, roasted, and cupped as is (without sorting out unripes, floaters, or over-ripes). This is called a YIELD sample. A yield sample lets Cuatro M, as well as the producer, know things like how much of the coffee they produced is of export quality, what the overall cup quality is of their entire yield, what the sugar content of the cherries are, how much pulp there is in relation to seed, etc, etc. All of these statistics get recorded, and made into portfolios, which are then shared with the producers at the end of harvest. Cuatro M runs a very transparent operation. In fact, no one else in Central America is collecting this kind of data and doing this kind of in-depth research. Topeca Coffee is truly breaking new ground in the understanding of growing and processing good coffee.
Yield samples come in on Mondays, and are cupped throughout the week. Then there are patio samples which also get cupped. These are coffees that have already been cherry sorted and processed, and have finished drying on the patio. At Cuatro M every lot and micro-lot is processed and kept separate through the whole ordeal. Unless a customer specifies them to be blended, they will remain separated up until exported. Some lots are too big to be processed all at once. They get processed in BATHCES or PARTIDAS. This is what I'm cupping: every partida in the warehouse.
The warehouse is stacked to the ceiling with sacks of parchment coffee. There can be several partidas in one stack. This paper tag, has all the information about that particular coffee. The varietal, date harvested, date processed, the farm, the tablon, the partida number, which drier it was dried in, what patio it was dried on, and the amount of coffee in that partida. My job is to pull a diverse sample of each partida, with this:
Then I take these:
And run them through this:
After that, I'm left with this:
But I'm not done yet. Now I have to clean each sample by hand, sorting out the excess defects.
Remember this is coffee that hasn't been sorted through the dry mill yet, so it still has quite a bit of defects. Once cleaned the samples are roasted in the sample roaster.
Now it's time to cup the coffees
When you cup a coffee you are looking to analyse several different attributes and flavor characteristics of the cup. First you analyse the FRAGRANCE (dry grounds): how intense is it, favorable or not, what specific smells are you smelling, and what is the quality (6-10) does it have? Then you pour water on the grounds to start the extraction and analyse the same things mentioned above. These smell in the wet grounds is called AROMA. When the coffees have properly extracted you skim any grounds or floating cellulose matter off the top and beging to analyze the flavors, and tactile experiences. When it's semi hot you look at two things, the FLAVOR, and AFTERTASTE. Again, is it good or bad, what specific flavors or category of flavors, and what is the quality. As it cools down below 140 degrees you then examine the ACIDITY and BODY. These two attributes increase as the temperature cools. Acidity is the perceived brightness of a coffee. Think of citrus fruits here, or the malic acidity found in apples, or phosphoric acid which is added to many soft drinks.
It's funny when you talk about acidity to the average American, they have no real reference for discussing it. No one ever mentions it when describing a food to someone. In fact, most people equate the word with bitterness, or acid reflux syndrome. Actually, only one type of acid in brewed coffee is attributed to perceived bitterness: quinic acid, which is reactive with oxygen. It's what you taste when you leave a pot of coffee on the burner for an hour and come back to it. However, most bitterness in coffee is caused by either improper roasting (burning) or improper brewing (over-extraction). It's the heavier organic elements, such as iodine and alkaloids that give a poorly brewed cup of coffee a bitter flavor. But ask a Salvadoran to describe a fruit that they are eating, and acidity is the first thing they describe; "es muy acido, el acidez es bueno. Es mas citrico de flores."
Body can be better described as the perceived tactile mouthfeel relative to water. Is it thin, or is it thick? After you analyse these four attributes, and when the coffee cools to below 100 degrees, you look at BALANCE, or how well those four attributes fit together as a complete coffee. After that, you look to see if it is a CLEAN CUP (are there any non-coffee flavors present?), a UNIFORM cup (is it uniform from cup to cup), and a sweet cup (is there anything taking away from the coffee's inherent SWEETNESS). The last score you give a coffee is your own personal score: the OVERALL score. This is the only subjective score. Then you add all those up to get a final score. In the case of the highest score I gave today, it was an 88, and the coffee was a natural processed HG Bourbon from our Ayutepeque plantation.
The really awesome thing about my getting to do this, is that I'll have the unique position to have tasted almost all of the coffees harvested this year. That means I'll know exactly what the most delicious lots are. So look out Tulsa; come March/April be expecting some spectacular coffees.
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