Coffee Day 2: Don't Overthink It

Samples A, B, and C being brewed. Our first coffee tasting task is to describe what we taste in these samples, before we've been briefed on the flavor wheel.

I'm exhausted, but I'm gonna write this anyway because, as a coffee person and fellow Trader Joe's fan once said, "sometimes good things happen when you don't feel like it."

Tasting is hard work. Drinking coffee all day is exhausting. Trying to be objective without losing your ability to experience things subjectively is hard. Following protocol can feel overwhelming. Being in close proximity with people for a long time requires patience as well as giving and receiving grace. Today is much harder than yesterday. Yesterday we drank coffee for fun, today feels like we're learning to work. We're just starting out on our journey to become "professional" tasters who can leave our personal preferences at the door and turn our subjective experiences into objective measurements to become "trained human instruments".

The class is bigger today. There are eight of us here for SCA Sensory Foundations. Four of us (including me) will be sticking around for the Q next week. Three others are just here for rest of the week, for the SCA Sensory Intermediate segment, which starts tomorrow. One person is only here for the day. The tone among the students today is more serious. We freely mix and mingle before class, we excitedly laugh and chatter as we taste the various substances Valerian has whipped up to demonstrate some aspect of flavor perception or another, but there are moments when certain topics come up when the four of us who are here for the Q snap to attention, the easy-going expressions evaporate and we put our game faces on, like we're bracing ourselves for the trials to come.

Everyone's learning to taste today. Today is the day we learn how to use the SCA flavor wheel as more than a wall decoration that virtue-signals our specialty coffee bona-fides. There's a lot of slurping and clinking glasses.

As we learn the protocol and discuss what we're tasting, Valerian says over and over, "Don't overthink it. The first gut feeling is usually correct."

But that's harder than it sounds.

This is how I've felt all day. Source: https://youtu.be/XziLNeFm1ok?t=227

It's Tuesday, and the course is SCA Sensory Foundations.

Another day, another coffee course. Today was SCA Sensory Foundations, which is the first class in the SCA Sensory module. You can get more details on the scope of the course from the listing on the Boot website, but the gist of it is that the sensory module covers how humans perceive flavor, how that applies to flavors in coffee, and the SCA protocol for tasting, evaluating, and describing coffees, called cupping.

The "Foundations" course today is an introduction to the concepts and protocols we'll be using for the "Intermediate" course, which starts tomorrow. I wrote this post to review and organize my notes from the day, so if it feels like a bit of a grab bag, that's because it's a summary of an overview.

Sensory Analysis

The goal of sensory analysis is to provide objective measurements for subjective experiences. It is a scientific discipline that applies principles of experimental design and statistical analysis to the use of human senses for the purpose of evaluating consumer products.

The basic elements of sensory analysis are:

Standardized Preparation: this is the protocol and experimental design.
Calibration: creating consistency between participating graders.
Reptition

We apply this practice to coffee through the process of cupping green coffee beans to evaluate their potential. This process allows us to:

Identify problems (i.e. taints and defects)
Identify pleasantries
Evaluate the intensity of individual sensations such as aroma or acidity
Establish the potential of the coffee for roasting, blending, and brewing.

We need this to be consistent and fair because it affects the price of a given lot of green coffee, which is critical in making sure buyers get what they're looking for and farmers are fairly compensated for their product.

We become good graders through two processes: training and calibration.

Training teaches us the common frameworks and language for evaluating coffee. It provides structures that make subjective experiences more repeatable and tools to capture and describe them.
Calibration is the process of working with other graders to create consistency in how we assess and score coffees. It involves agreeing on what characteristics are favorable or unfavorable for different kinds of coffees, independent of personal preference. It requires us to experience and discuss a range of coffees that span different origins, taste profiles, and quality levels to gain references for each.

🤔

You can't be a good grader without going through these two steps (and constantly working on staying in calibration). This actually feels reassuring: of course I shouldn't expect to feel ready for the Q today. I'm not trained yet, nor calibrated, but there's a process here. At the same time, the process isn't easy or insignificant even though the course is only two weeks. Each of us is going to need to draw on our memories of the things we've experienced and tasted throughout our lives (coffee or otherwise) to make this process work in the short time that we have.

Aside: Cupping and San Francisco

Supposedly, the practice of cupping started in San Francisco at Hills Bros. Coffee. One of my classmates recommended a book called "Coffeeland" (link below) that goes into some of the history of coffee as a commercial product.

Physiology and Sensory Attributes

Just as we discussed yesterday, the three main senses used in experiencing coffee are olfaction (smell), gustation (taste), and taction (touch/mouthfeel).
For coffee, they tend to be experienced in that order: olfaction, gustation, taction.
Arguably, vision and hearing could affect our experience of a coffee as well, but for the purposes of cupping, they're more likely to introduce bias.
Smell and taste combine to create the experience of flavor. Supposedly, 80% of flavor comes from smell.
Although it's less common, other senses besides smell can affect taste as well. Valerian shared the example of the "Sonic Cake Pop" from the restaurant House of Wolf. In this experience, diners could "call" one of two numbers which would play different sounds. Depending on the sound they picked, the chocolate cake pop they ate would either taste more sweet or more bitter. In another example, the strawberry mousse from the restaurant El Bulli could taste up to 15% sweeter on a white plate than a black one.
In terms of its applications to coffee, we discussed how getting a pour over in a paper cup is a suboptimal experience. Not only does the wax coating of the paper impart a flavor into the drink, but it doesn't feel "premium" and likely affects the perception of the drink. Valerian guesses that guests would rate a drink served in a ceramic vessel highest, followed by glass, given our association with fine ceramic items as more premium than glass.

Experiencing Flavor

We did a simple experiment where everyone closed their eyes and pinched their noses. Then, each of us was handed a different flavored jelly bean, which we first tasted with just our sense of taste, then with both taste and smell. Mine turned out to be a green apple jelly bean. Without my nose, it tasted a bit sweet and a tiny bit tart, but after a little while I was struggling to taste the sweetness, even though I knew that a jelly bean is almost always very sweet.

Aromas are composed of many compounds that combine together to create a mental image, which we call "aroma objects". For example,

Violet + Fruity + Caramel = Pineapple

In this example, "violet", "fruity", and "caramel" are shorthand for certain compounds that evoke those aromas. When combined together in the right ratios, they create an aroma that evokes pineapple.

My takeaway from this was that our brains try to match the raw signal of what compounds you're smelling to a pattern of aroma objects that make sense to you. So different people smelling the same compounds might experience different things based on what aromas they've experienced before, and scents might be more memorable once we're more familiar with similar ones. In other words, if I taste more coffee and taste more unique things that aren't coffee, I'll likely get better at tasting and remembering aromas in coffee.

Taste

Apparently, we'll learn much more about olfactory cilia and papillae later.
We talked about the five current "basic tastes" yesterday, but today we learned how they're defined. A "basic taste" is one that has evolutionary importance and that we have taste buds for.
In terms of evolutionary importance, we could say that sweet tastes indicate a source of energy, salt lets us detect electrolytes, acid might indicate spoilage in food, bitter often correlates with poison, and umami might indicate amino acids.
There are other sensations that might qualify as basic tastes, but haven't been accepted as such, like "fat" and "metallic".
This podcast episode about umami was also recommended.

Taste indicates "Is it good for me?" while flavor indicates "What is this?"

Tangent: Brewing for Tasting

The brewer in the cover photo is a Chemex. If you haven't had a chance to play with it before, I'd recommend James Hoffman's video about it:

In the formalized process of cupping, we don't brew using a Chemex but instead use an immersive brewing method that involves brewing coffee directly in a set of cupping bowls, which minimizes the effects of brewing technique and maximizes our opportunity to smell the fragrance of the dry coffee grounds and the aroma of the brewing coffee.

More on that process in the coming days, but if you want a quick preview, I'll link again to the James Hoffman video on this topic that I shared in the preface post:

Cupping Process Notes

The full SCA cupping protocol can be found on their website. Here are some miscellaneous things I learned while we went through the protocol.

"Body" refers to the viscosity of coffee, which is primarily driven by lipids, but not entirely. One easy way to think about it is to compare a coffee sample to dairy. From least body to most body, we have: Skim milk, 2%, whole milk, and half-and-half. I started trying to assign a coffee sample to the closest one of those options and it's helped me differentiate samples on body.
Some coffees lose flavor as they cool. We say that such coffees "fall apart".
The color reference for a sample roast is for the color of the ground coffee, not the beans. Ground coffee tends to be a lighter color than the beans because the beans roast from the outside in, so the inner part of the bean that's exposed in grinding may be a lighter shade than the exterior.

Valerian's Tips for the Q

Rest your brain. The Q is hard because it's so many tests all at once. After 1-2 days you'll be very tired. Do what you need to rest your brain: sleep early, meditate, etc.
Eat whatever powers your brain through the day. You might not want to eat heavy foods, but you may not want to drastically alter your diet either if you're not used to it.
Avoid strong flavors like garlic, onions, or spicy food.
Be super careful about not burning your tongue. If you burn your tongue, you're in trouble.
Don't get thrown off even if you mess up. You'll have a chance to retake some exams during the Q week and there's a good chance you'll have to, so mentally prepare to take a few more tests. Don't give up or run out of steam after a few tough ones.