Coffee Day 0: Being Uncomfortable
First, a confession: this post is back-dated.
I'm writing this after my two weeks of coffee classes ended (and after several of the posts in the series), but I felt like I needed to add a preface explaining what the coffee class series is about for people who might not know what coffee cupping or a "Q Grader" is. The original idea for this series was to pass along some notes from the classes I took so that my friend Ming (who couldn't make the first part) could read them and catch up. After I wrote a couple posts I realized that I enjoyed writing them and could share them more broadly (and in any case, it was taking me so long to publish them that Ming had already joined the class).
Lemme take you back to a little bit before the beginning:
> No worries. Eugene's already here helping us. – Mabel 10:16 am
Ugh. Now I have to apologize to him too.
I'm racing north on 880 on Sunday morning to meet Ming and Mabel to roast coffee at CoRo in Berkeley. I dragged Eugene into it too since he was curious about roasting and willing to help sort some beans. After that, I'm going to head up North to San Rafael to check in to my hotel. The entire trunk of my car is filled with clothes, food, and coffee gear for two weeks of coffee classes. It's just far enough that I decided to stay in a hotel instead of commuting up and down each day. The class is about tasting flavors in coffee, and I'm not risking my nose not working because I woke up too early to drive up. So instead my trunk is full: I've got a small air purifier to mitigate the risk of allergies, a black IKEA bag full of instant noodles and protein bars in case I can't find anything to eat, my gym shoes, and six or seven workout shirts in case I find a gym.
Sitting beside all that is a big crate of coffee gear for practicing in my hotel room: a grinder, a gooseneck kettle, six cupping bowls, a set of spoons, six identical flight glasses for mixture identification, a very expensive collection of thirty-six vials of scents found in coffee made by a company in France, a collection of organic acids in powder form as well as sugar and salt for testing taste modalities, coffee that's been purposely roasted incorrectly, and twenty four small samples of different coffees packaged up in an advent calendar from last December. I brought a couple books too: The World Atlas of Coffee by James Hoffman and Sip'n' Slurp by Freda Yuan.
I'm taking this as seriously as anything I've attempted, and I'm not taking any chances. These two weeks are going to cost me more than the month long world tour I did six years ago, and I'm determined to make them count.
I'm already starting off on the back foot: by the time I reach Berkeley, Mabel, Ming, and Eugene have already wrapped up roasting, and all that's left for me to do is to get some lunch and coffee.
The "Q" (a.k.a. I Promise I Didn't Join A Cult)
The "Q" stands for "quality". The class I'm taking is for a professional certification from the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) called the "Q Arabica", which certifies someone to evaluate the quality of green coffee beans through inspection and cupping (a prescriptive way to brew and taste coffee). The Q involves a battery of 20 different exams that you have to pass in order to get the certification. These test your sensory acuity, knowledge of grading procedures, and practical performance in cupping. Q graders help rate coffees on a scale from 0-100 to determine whether a coffee qualifies as "speciality grade" (80 points and above) or "commodity grade". There are a lot of technical aspects to it, which is why I had half my coffee lab in my trunk, but the main thing is preparing samples and tasting coffees to assign scores and descriptors via the process of cupping.
Which was what I was afraid of. I'd spent the past couple years trying as many different coffees as I could, and particularly in the last couple months had went out of my way to visit distinguished cafes in Taipei and Singapore while I was traveling to try even more. Even with that intentionality, I felt inconsistent in tasting and describing the flavors of coffee. Some days, for some cups, it was clear as day, as if the flavors were shot through a prism and they each impressed themselves on my palate, one at a time. Other times, even the most expensive coffee just tasted "like coffee", though with a discernible (yet indescribable) complexity that hinted at its quality. This course was going to be a trial by fire: either I was going to leave the class confident in my ability to taste and discuss the "notes" in coffee, or I was going to leave coffee behind as a hobby and conclude that I was physically incapable of enjoying it the same way my friends did.
Doesn't That Seem Kinda Reckless?
Yeah, it did. My friend Ming told me about the class earlier this year and asked if I wanted to take it with him. I hemmed and hawed at it for weeks for all the reasons I listed above. Then I got laid off and suddenly had a lot more time on my hands and an urgent need for self-discovery. I figured whether or not my next career move would be in the coffee industry, it would probably involve drinking coffee, and I wanted to understand my relationship with it.
Trying to take the Q to enjoy drinking coffee more is like trying to take the MCAT to figure out whether you have a cold: it's super overkill. Nevertheless, I had a good feeling about this, so I signed up for the one week Q course and the week of courses before it, which covered coffee broadly (SCA Intro to Coffee) and coffee tasting specifically (SCA Sensory Foundations & Intermediate). Ming couldn't make that first week (hence this blog), but would join for the Q week, which is how I ended up seeing him in Berkeley before heading off for a week of coffee learning on my own.
The Community Around the Cup
I don't make a lot of decisions on intuition – it's just not how I'm wired – but I felt good about this one because there's always been something about coffee that feels right to me philosophically. It brings people together whether that’s around a table or around the world. I think it's a "romantic" drink the way that wine is: it connects us to these ancient traditions and grand stories that help us feel like we have a place in the wider world. When I went into the course, I was thinking about how you can order roasted coffee from a roastery halfway across the country (say, Ampersand in Boulder Colorado), and they'd freshly roast some green beans from halfway around the world (say, the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia), and the product would arrive at your door in two or three days. Everything about coffee, from cafes to origins to brewers, has such a sense of place. The vibe around coffee is comforting, welcoming, and cozy: hiding in a cafe on a dark rainy day, sipping on something while catching up with a friend, or visiting a new city and having an easy way to find something local.
As I would learn throughout the course, not only is coffee deeply tied to the places its prepared and grown (terroir), but it's inextricably tied to history: the history of our civilization (and frequently, the unsavory parts) and of ourselves, as what we taste in the cup reflects the foods and places we've experienced before as if holding a mirror up to ourselves. Talking about what you do (or don't) taste or giving a flavor descriptor only to find that you're the only person in the room who's tried that flavor before is uncomfortable, and like every process of self-discovery, it's often exhausting too.
I was so exhausted every day after class that I didn't have a chance to use almost any of the things that I brought: I never brewed more coffee, I never practiced my organic acids, and for the first week I only went to the gym once. Instead, I reflected on what I had learned, what I had experienced, and wrote these posts to organize my thoughts. There were many times when I thought, "Wow, for the amount I spent on this, I could've gotten myself a nice espresso machine and made delicious milk drinks every morning for the rest of my life." But that was never the choice I was going to make.
I'm not into coffee for the comfort, I'm in it for the exploration, and exploration requires being a bit uncomfortable.