After hearing about Counter Culture Coffee and its weekly "cuppings" (a.k.a. tastings) two weeks ago . . . and hearing from several of you that you'd be interested in attending one with me . . . we made it happen Friday.  Melissa of Counter Intelligence, along with two other folks who read this blog (but who haven't identified themselves here and who, out of respect for their right to remain anonymous, I won't name) made our way through the pouring rain to the sort-of-tricky-to-find Adams Morgan office of Counter Culture Coffee for the 10 AM event.  Melissa was the veteran in our group, having attended her first cupping at a different spot earlier in the week—and her experience showed when she called out "green beans" in response to our host's request for descriptions of what we'd tasted in the second of four different coffee samples that we blind smelled/tasted.  As it turns out, green bean is a classic defining flavor characteristic of coffee from Yirgacheffe in the Idido Misty Valley of Ethiopia, which we would learn minutes later was the place of origin of the coffee Melissa was describing . . . coffee grown by Counter Culture Coffee partner Abdullah Bagersh.  A detailed profile of this coffee can be found on Counter Culture's Web site here.  I reference Melissa's coffee cupping "experience" here in jest; the truth is, she appears to have a much more sensitive . . . refined . . . you pick a word . . . palate than mine, which I suspect she has long employed in all of her eating and drinking . . . not just in her recent coffee tasting!

So what was my less sophisticated palate telling me Friday morning?  Well, before embarrassing myself, I'll tell you a little about the "cupping" process.  The ritual of coffee cupping was developed long ago by coffee traders, to identify coffee worth buying.  Cupping, as taught to us Friday by Counter Culture's gracious  DC Customer Relations rep Ryan Jensen (pictured below), consists of four basic steps, with clipboard note taking along the way:

1. Smelling the freshly ground beans dry for fragrance;
2. Adding hot water to the grounds and smelling the wet grounds for aroma as they begin to steep;
3. Breaking the "crust" of grounds that forms on the top of the steeping coffee and again smelling the aroma (pictured below right); and
4. After removing the grounds from the top of the coffee, tasting the coffee repeatedly using a soup spoon and slurping the coffee to fully aerate it and spray it around the interior of your mouth so it hits all of your taste buds . . . focusing during separate slurps on brightness/perceived acidity, flavor, body and aftertaste.

 

After hearing a thorough explanation of the cupping process, I approached the first cup of coffee grounds and took a whiff.  What fragrance did I sense?  "Wet wood" as one of my fellow cuppers did?  Or "tobacco" as did another?  Nope . . . I smelled "coffee" . . . that's about all I could come up with at the first sample.  If this were a test, I thought to myself, I'd fail.  But cupping isn't a test and the atmosphere was friendly . . . not intimidating in the least.  Cuppers go by a general rule of not discussing the coffees until the cupping is done, so I had no idea what interesting and creative things my fellow cuppers were smelling and tasting.  And though my perceptions of the first coffee I smelled were so embarrassingly . . . well . . . unperceptive, things changed when I decided to hold off on taking notes and walked over to coffee number two.  It's the side-by-side aspect of the cupping that makes it possible for someone like myself to appreciate differences between coffees.  The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel helped too!

Rather than sharing with you my admittedly unsophisticated tasting notes, I'll share with you a photo of the grease board summary of the tasting notes of my fellow cuppers.  When we were done tasting, we sat around for another hour with Ryan at the grease board leading our discussion of what we'd tasted and where it came from . . . including fascinating information about the growers themselves and Counter Culture's relationships with them, the regions where the coffees were grown, the methods of processing that vary considerably from region to region and various other factoids.  At the end of compiling our tasting notes for a particular coffee, Ryan would ask where we thought the coffee was from.  Several of the more experienced cuppers—there were about a dozen cuppers present—were able to blindly identify not only the country of origin, but also the region of origin within the country.  In addition to tasting Abdullah Bagersh's coffee from the Idido Misty Valley of Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, we also tasted La Golondrina coffee from Cauca, Colombia, Kuta coffee from the Waghi Valley of Papua New Guinea and Dolok Sanggul coffee of Lintong, Sumatra.

I've long been hooked on coffee . . . and now I think I'm hooked on learning about who grows the coffee I drink, as well as where and how they grow it.  So you'll likely be seeing more coffee talk here in the future.  And I want to thank not only my readers who joined me at the cupping, but also Ryan and the folks at Counter Culture Coffee for the free education . . . no sales pitch of any kind . . . just free education.  I really appreciate it.  Counter Culture Coffee has earned itself a new customer.  Cheers!