Coffee curation and the pursuit of flavour
As mentioned in the last post, we are currently working on a water project that will become a little book. Part of that process is the inspiration for this article. During the project we organised blind taste testing sessions, and we drew up our own scoring sheet for participants to use. We did this in order to split up a few specific sections and try to achieve more objective and quantifiable results in relation to the tests we were doing. Below is a link to one of the graphs that displays the sensory results of one coffee blind scored across...
Read moreHaving been preoccupied with this question, its been a little while since I've written a post. Water is naturally a huge part of a cup of coffee and the more and more we look at it the more it presents itself as one of the biggest players in a cup of coffees' flavour. We choose our coffees carefully, buying from roasters whose coffees we enjoy. On occasion we have really struggled with a few coffees. In these instances the coffees were not just a little flat or uninspiring, but were actively unpleasant. The roasters we work with have always been...
Read moreLet me describe a manifesto of sorts regarding speciality coffee; a statement of intent. - To bring together peoples involved in speciality coffee, from across different cultural, economic and experiential backgrounds and to unite them with a common language of communication as well as more united reference points for quality and grading. Achieving and improving these aspects of world wide coffee, from producers to consumers, has the potential to benefit all of those involved - This statement is of my own hand, yet it is, I believe representative of the epic and admirable ambitions of the Q program. The Q...
Read moreSince writing last, I've changed the title of this post a little. Indeed the conclusion of the last post does itself produce many inconveniences, it means taste aesthetics need to be communicated and discussed when presenting a product rather than the invisibility that was the inspiration for the original title. It means considering what speciality coffee means rather than just saying this is a speciality classified bean and therefore it is a speciality coffee product that you are drinking. It means asking whether speciality coffee is being made accessible if the format that many of the drinks are consumed in...
Read moreSpeciality coffee is often rightly described as hard to define. Some descriptions are more specific, such as a coffee that scores above 84* on the cupping table. Whilst other definitions are more about an ethos and a general idea of quality. This last notion is tricksy and not particularly helpful to anyone. The cupping score definition I can kinda get on board with. But what really is a cupping score? It's a number that correlates to a taste experience, and that's really what speciality coffee is, a taste experience. A cupping assessment is a reflective term for taste aesthetics that...
Read moreI mine the resources of analogy and metaphor rather intensively when talking about coffee. I do it when presenting and discussing coffee to a wide variety of customers and even more so when training people. I wanted to muse a little about the worth of analogy in communication and also about its inherent shortcomings. I want to focus particularly on what is great about the wine analogy for speciality coffee. Quite often in the realms of twitterland and speciality coffee discussions this particular analogy has a tough time, so much so that it is often labelled awful and useless. A...
Read moreExpectation and goals have been a running theme in this blog and it’s a cornerstone of how we think about our coffee business, and about speciality coffee in relation to the wider market. Michael Beverland is a Professor of Marketing who heads up the Bath University Marketing department; he also props up the bar at our shop and drinks a lot of coffee. Recently he shared the experiences he had whilst engaging a group of his current MSC students in a task. The task was to think of a brand, a well known one, but one which personally you have...
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