Coffee Day 5: This Is Supposed To Be Fun
Why indeed.
First, some context: we were doing some comparative exercises, answering questions like "Which of these coffees is sweeter?" and "Which has a more favorable acidity?". And we were overthinking it. We had learned that the intensity of acidity and the quality of acidity are not the same. More intensity often leads to more quality if it's a good kind of acidity, but if it's a bad kind of acidity, then more intensity just makes it more bad. We waffled between the two cups, one that clearly had more acidity, the other less, because we weren't sure if we were being tested on whether this was a "good" or "bad" kind of acidity.
Why did we suspect a trick?
Fade to day one of sensory: Valerian has a slide showing the senses. As you may recall, the senses involved in evaluating coffee are: taste, smell, and touch. There's an eye labeled "Vision", an ear labeled "Hearing", a tongue labeled "Taste", a nose labeled "Smell", and a hand labeled "Touch".
"What do we use to smell?" Valerian asks. Everyone points to their noses.
"What do we use to taste?" Everyone points to their tongues.
"What do we use to touch?" The class takes a beat. When he did this to us in SCA Intro to Coffee, we all raised our hands. "Wrong!" Valerian declares with a chuckle. "We touch coffee with our tongues!".
Smash cut to earlier in the day: Valerian was telling us about how he helped a cupper build confidence in her sensory abilities by asking her to find the odd coffee out in a set of three (a triangulation), but secretly all three coffees were the same. She eventually insisted that there was no difference, and she was right.
And then, a little later: as we were cupping a round of coffees, we encountered our first cup with a defect. In one of the twenty cups on the table, there was a phenolic flavor, which made it taste chemically, like pool water. Even though we had weighed and ground all the samples for the cupping ourselves, Valerian had somehow snuck in a bean spiked with phenol that produced the faulty cup. In the bustle of tasting through all five cups of each of the four samples, I had tasted the cup but missed the phenol. I was paranoid after that.
So we were wary of tricks. We knew Valerian would keep us on our toes, and we had to stay vigilant. Not overthinking it is hard. When you suddenly learn a lot of stuff, you worry that you're under-thinking it. It takes practice and experience to hone in on what matters and what doesn't, to calibrate yourself to think efficiently so that you don't wear yourself out second guessing yourself.
It was Friday, the last day of SCA Sensory Intermediate.
Ok, no more essays. Today, let's talk about some of the exercises we did to develop our sensory acuity. Most of these exercises are easiest to do at a coffee lab that has plenty of supplies and different coffees available to play with, but I added some notes about how you might be able to do some of these at home (ideally with a few friends to help set up and clean up).
Smell With Your Feelings
I said before that if my brain isn't working, my nose isn't working. There's a big mental component to our ability to smell. I think that's good news: training your brain is easier than changing your cells. Through practice and intentional exposure to different smells, you can increase the range and depth of smells you can perceive.
We used a tool called Le Nez du Café to practice remembering smells. This kit contains 36 labeled scent vials, each representing one of the aromas found in coffee. Each vial has a number on it, and there's a booklet telling you the names of the aromas that correspond to each of the numbers. Just a quick semantic note: I'm using the term "aroma" here to mean "smell" generically since that's the term Le Nez uses. Some of these smells are found in the dry coffee grounds ("fragrance") and some in the wet coffee ("aroma"), and some are defects that you wouldn't want to find in any coffee. It's meant to be a training and calibration tool: having a lot of different aromas to practice with trains you to distinguish them, and having the smells in a distilled form instead of a natural one reduces variance so that we can use it as a point of reference.
That doesn't mean that the vials in the Le Nez kit evoke the most specific and accurate versions of a given aroma. Some aromas smelled more realistic, and others more "fake". Aromas in real life are blends of many complex molecules, some of which don't last long, and particular mixtures of these molecules allow us to differentiate many variations of a given aroma. For example, the flavor of chocolate is common and recognizable, but we've all encountered many different kinds of chocolates: even without going into the flavors of different cacao, Hershey's Kisses taste very different from a dark chocolate bar. We could identify them both as chocolately, but they have a very different quality both in flavor and aroma. The Le Nez kit includes a "dark chocolate" (#26), but it's not the best smelling chocolate you've ever had. It's kinda generic. Ditto with the apple (#17).
Some of the aromas don't smell quite right at first, like lemon (#15). I thought that one would be straightforward: it seems like everyone in California grows lemons in their backyards, but Californians tend to grow Meyer lemons, which have a slightly different fragrance than, say, an Italian lemon variety. I'm unsure what variety the Le Nez lemon (#15) is meant to resemble, but it took me a couple tries to recognize the lemon in the scent.
Valerian's staring at me across the table as I desperately try to identify the scent in the little glass bottle in front of me.
"Either you were lying to me then or you're lying now. You said you had memories associated with this scent when you smelled it at lunch."
I didn't smell much. It faintly reminded me of four different options: Earth (#1), Cedar (#6), Smoke (#32), and Pipe Tobacco (#33). Every time I smelled it, it got fainter.
I was hoping one of the distinguishing aspects of the aroma would pop out. Was it a bit woodier like Cedar (#6)? Was it a bit sweet like Pipe Tobacco (#33)? A mix of sweet spice and ash like Smoke (#32)? Smelling it in isolation as I was doing, nothing stood out. After a couple weeks of sniffing bottles, I knew when a scent just wasn't gonna materialize for me, so I wrote down my best guess, Cedar (#6), and called it.
Wrong. It's Earth (#1). But even though I had memories of the smell of moist dirt from planting my garden, the Le Nez Earth (#1) aroma sometimes subconsciously reminded me of walking through the foggy redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains. I'd have to drill those aromas again when I got back to my hotel room to reinforce my memory and lock in the differences.
That's a lot of setup to say that the way you practice with the Le Nez kit is to sniff each of the bottles one at a time to learn their scent and associate them with their labels. Once you've done that a few times, you can blindly open a bottle, sniff it, and try to identify which one it is. It trains your ability to recall aromas and notice the difference between similar ones. It's much more useful for developing the general skill of remembering and analyzing smells than making sure you know exactly what a hazelnut (#29) smells like vs a walnut (#30) or a peanut (#28).
The main method that we learned for memorizing the smells was to sniff a bottle and write down what impressions and memories it evoked, even (especially) if the impression was different from what the label said. For example, almond (#27) smells Christmas-y to me. It reminds me of what I imagine an almond tart from The Great British Bake-off to smell like. It smells sweet. As another example, straw (#5) reminds me strongly of grass jelly. It reminded one of my classmates of a hay bale. I grew up drinking grass jelly. He had been on a lot of farms with hay bales. Different routes to the same place, and all individual and valid.
I'd recommend trying this method out if you can get your hands on some scents. It doesn't have to be a Le Nez set (unless you're prepping for the Q). An essential oils set could work, as could a handful of jelly beans. The key is to think about and write down how that smell (or flavor, if you're doing jelly beans) presents itself to you. Don't look at what the label says. Get in touch with your own senses and familiarize yourself with how it feels when you smell something. Identifying something from scratch is very different than matching it to a label. Pay attention to where and how you sense it: Is the smell strong or faint? Does you feel it in the front or back of your nose? Does it feel sweet or salty (or bitter or sour or umami)? Does a metaphor spring to mind, like "high notes" vs "low notes"? Does it have a color?
Once you've written down your impressions, check the label and see what you think. Smell it again and see if you can interpret it the same way as the label. Maybe you can form the same aroma object as the label with some prompting. Maybe you see where they're coming from, but there are elements of the smell that remind you more strongly of something else instead. Maybe you completely disagree with the perfumers and flavorists. That's fine too. You want to get into the practice of bringing all your aroma sensing tools to bear: your memories of other aromas, your subconscious feelings and associations, and your ability to describe the sensations happening in your nose and mouth.
Once you start doing this with some friends, things get even more interesting. We noticed that how a smell was perceived varied between people, between kits, and between days. For example, I perceive the Le Nez almond (#27) and walnut (#30) aromas as sweet and the peanut aroma (#28) as salty. One of my friends felt the opposite: he perceived peanut as sweet and almond as salty. Of course, you can't smell sweetness or saltiness. This bit about smelling taste modalities is literally all in our heads. My association with almonds was marzipan and baked goods, so I thought it was sweet. The walnut scent reminded me of my grandma's favorite ice cream, butter pecan. My association with peanuts was a snack can of salted peanuts, so I perceived it as salty. My friend might have been picturing salted almonds and peanut brittle, which would make for salty almonds and sweet peanuts. There's nothing right or wrong about it. It can be hard to differentiate certain clusters of aromas in the Le Nez kit (like the nuts, #27-30), so you use whatever trick works for you. If you remember one nut as sweet and one as salty, it doesn't matter how other people perceive it as long as you perceive them that way consistently.
Another weird thing: some aromas took a few days to appear. Valerian mentioned in class that sometimes we can be "asleep" to some aromas that need some time to "wake up". The Flavor book also talked about this: if you encounter a situation where your brain needs to detect or differentiate smells that it didn't have to before, you'll sometimes develop the ability to do so after repeated exposure. When I first smelled the kit, some aromas didn't smell like anything to me. I could faintly detect something, but it came and went and was always so faint that I couldn't really pin it. When I first opened the kit, earth (#1), tea rose (#11), blackcurrant (#14), and butter (#18) all smelled like nothing. For a while I was trying to figure out whether my kit was a dud or if my nose was. I reviewed them a few times, taking them out once every day or two to smell through each one. After a couple tries, I could smell tea rose (#11) easily, earth (#1) most of the time, and even butter (#18) very faintly, but blackcurrant (#14) eluded me for over a week. After a while, I could smell something in the blackcurrant (#14), but I couldn't place the smell or associate any impressions or memories with it. We discussed it in class for a while (a lot of folks struggled with this one). Most memorably, someone said it smelled like dried beer. After looking for each of the things people mentioned in it, I managed to identify it most of the time. It even started to take on the scent of the leaves of a berry bush. Moral of the story is that if you don't smell something the first time, don't panic. Sometimes your brain will adapt to identify it after repeated exposure.
But sometimes, it's spotty. Some days, bottles that I could smell the day before would suddenly go dark. Sometimes, I'd spend an hour drilling on similar aromas and identify differentiating features about each only for things to jumble up again the next day. It got even more uneven between kits. Between our classmates, we had several different kits made at different times. Different production runs can create slightly different scents for the same aroma name, and they degrade faster or slower over time depending on how they're used and stored. Since the Q includes tests where you have to match bottles between two sets, our instructors had to get two kits from the same batch to ensure that they'd smell the same. Sometimes an aroma would smell one way on one kit and then be totally different on another. Other times, an aroma would be perceptible in one kit but be too faint in the other or start smelling like a different aroma. The general takeaway is that even with practice, smell can be finicky. If you're not taking a test on it, then no worries, just know that you don't need to panic if something smells one way one day and then a bit different the next. If you are taking the Q, I'd recommend calibrating on the test kits if you're able to. Even if you know your own kit by heart, the test kits may be different from yours (or even from each other, despite the same-batch protocol).
I feel like the Le Nez kit is a better training tool than an evaluation one. Practicing with it was eye-opening, but being able to recite the names, numbers, and categories of each aroma in the kit and identifying them by smell is just a cool party trick. It's really useful for exercising your sense of smell, but I wouldn't over-index on it unless you're taking the Q, in which case practicing with the kit at home is one of the easier things you can work on prior to taking the class.
Hello Coffee, Nice to Meet You
We cupped more coffee, of course. Going through the ritual of the full SCA cupping procedure over and over again made it easier. As the motions of it got less distracting, I had more time and mental energy to focus on the flavors of the coffee instead. As with the Le Nez kit, I found that the more samples you try, the more things jump out at you. Getting to try a bunch of different coffees is important for learning how to differentiate coffees, and it's one of the benefits of taking a training at a proper coffee lab.
In this cupping, I was super thrown because there was a spiked sample (phenol) but I didn't spot it even though I tasted every cup. This was the first time I'd encountered a spiked sample. I hadn't calibrated on defects (e.g. tasted them) before; I'd only heard their flavors described ("kinda like pool water or drinking from a garden hose"). Afterwards, I was so paranoid that for days I wrote "phenol" every time I tasted something weird, even when it was mold, some other defect, or not a defect at all.
We also calibrated on taste modalities by identifying sweet, sour, and salty solutions at varying intensities. It sounds like it should be easy to tell them apart (and at high intensities they are), but it can be tricky to tell if something is very slightly sweet or very slightly sour, for example.
Welcome to the Red Room
The next set of exercises involved comparing unidentified samples of coffee side-by-side. Because the goal was to differentiate the coffees based on their fragrance and flavor, we did these in a room that was illuminated by a dim red light to make it harder to tell the coffees apart by color. This adds its own twist to things by forcing everyone to be in the same small room together, juggling our various accouterment. By now we each had a spittoon, a cupping spoon, a small cup (for COVID protocol), a bottle of water, a pencil, and a clipboard. Every stool in the lab was recruited to create temporary work stations in the red room since none of those items were allowed on the tables with the coffee.
Let's start with the simpler exercise: targeted comparisons. In this exercise, we had trays with two coffees each. For each pair, there was a different question: "Which of these is sweeter?", "Which of these has a more pleasing acidity?", "Which of these tastes cleaner?". It's similar to what we did with taste modalities, but instead of ranking which citric acid solution was more sour, we did it with real coffees. I like how this exercise helps you break down a coffee's flavor into smaller components that are easier to analyze. It helps develop your ability to focus on one attribute at a time, and to remember flavor from one cup to the next, which is critical for scoring each of the ten categories on the SCA cupping form.
I think this is probably the easiest exercise to do at home. Just get a handful of coffees (maybe 2-4) and brew them up. Throw in a non-specialty coffee from the supermarket just to make the contrast starker if you can. Mix them up so that you don't know which is which, and then pick some axes to evaluate them on. Sweetness, acidity, and elements of mouthfeel like thickness and drying-ness could be fun to start with.
Next up were the triangulation exercises. Triangulation is a sensory test where there are sets of three cups. Two out of the three are the same coffee and one is different. Your job is to figure out for each set which is the odd one out. It sounds like it should be easy to tell two coffees apart. After all, the whole premise of specialty coffee is that different coffees taste different and that they are not just a fungible commodity. You can smell the difference between a non-specialty coffee and a good Gesha from a mile away, however, when you put similar coffees on the table it can get surprisingly tricky. The order in which you taste can amplify differences that exist or create ones that don't. When it's obvious, it's obvious, but when no obvious difference jumps out at you, it takes a lot of focus to zoom in on every little detail and taste things back and forth enough times to spot the difference. Especially under test conditions, this exercise is stressful.
In this exercise you usually want to analyze the coffees one axis at a time instead of trying to describe their flavor. We brewed each of these coffees using the SCA cupping protocol in the red room, so we got to see the coffee at many different stages of brewing to consider its fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, and body. At least for me, I had to make an intentional effort to take in the overall effect of the coffee to see if one axis or another would be easiest to compare. Advice from Valerian: do the easy thing. If the fragrance is clearly different, trust it. If the acidity is clearly different, trust it. If your achilles heel is describing the "body" and mouthfeel, try to examine every other factor first before relying on those. The more you taste the coffee, the more fatigued your palate gets, and the harder it is to spot the differences. The coffee also changes as it cools, and some differences are easier to spot at certain temperatures. You have to be vigilant about noting any differences you find right away and be confident to not second guess yourself later when the signal gets weaker.
"Are you blackberry jam? Yes. Are you blackberry jam? No."
"Fruit. Cereal water. Fruit."
"This is a little drying. This is also a little drying. I'm screwed."
Of the exercises we did, triangulation is probably the second most applicable (after cupping) when actually working on flavor development. It's used across the industry to experimentally determine if a difference is perceptible. Roasters use it when developing blends to make sure a blend tastes consistent as the input coffees change, or to evaluate if new equipment or operators are creating consistent results. Brewers use it to evaluate whether their brewing techniques are making a difference in the cup.
The test can work two ways: evaluating the tasters or evaluating the coffee. When you're taking a test, the coffees are known to be different and you're the one being judged. When you do this in practice, you don't know beforehand if there will be a perceptible difference between the samples, and you're judging the coffee. Note that this isn't a qualitative test: it's not about whether the odd one out tastes better or worse. It just determines if there's a perceptible difference. That difference can be a starting point to determine why they're different and which people prefer. Half the time, your goal is for there to not be a difference (e.g. making sure the latest version of your blend tastes the same as the previous one).
I'm not sure I'd recommend doing this at home unless you're practicing for the test or some other professional purpose. Specifically for the test, I think it takes some time to acclimate to the red room environment and get used to triangulating under pressure when there are a lot of people around you.
Week One Epilogue: Problem Student
Sitting in the lab after class on Friday, I was surprised at how much had happened in the last five days, and that there were still six more days of class to go.
Valerian walked away from the roaster and took a seat on the couch.
"But you're not a problem student. The only time we have a problem student is when someone is not willing to cooperate with the rest of the class or refuses to learn."
Thus ended the first week of classes. The week was hard work, but it was fun. I'd discovered that I wasn't hopeless even if I still felt like I had a ways to go in developing my abilities to taste and describe coffee. Learning was fulfilling, meeting new coffees was exciting. Being able to taste and smell intentionally added a new dimension to everyday things like taking a walk and smelling a jasmine bush from a block away or trying a mango tembleque and having the flavor just explode in my mouth.
Since we only had one day off between SCA Sensory Intermediate and the start of the Q, I took advantage of the downtime to eat food that might be too flavorful to eat during the test. My friend Arnav came over to visit, and we settled on some (mildly) spicy Burmese food for dinner and relished in the intense flavors.
