Counter Culture Cupping 2.13.09
My next stop (yeah for a 1/2 day!) found me at the weekly ‘cupping’ at Counter Culture in Durham. The event is held at their headquarters at 10am every Friday. There were a good 20 people at the cupping this week, including a few folks from a senior center that had arranged for an adventure to the south side of town.
Our visit started with a mini-lesson from one of the employees on the process of tasting coffee. We collected clipboards and pencils with forms for listing our personal observations for the coffee’s: Fragrance, Aroma, Break, Brightness, Flavor, Body and Acidity. For the laymans, they walked us through what each of these meant.
We would first smell the actual beans, listing the fragrance. Throughout the process we were encouraged to list exactly what came to our mind, not hold back and not be afraid to go out on a limb.
The room was arranged into stations, with five cups of different varieties of their coffees. After the fragrance came aroma. For this folks from CC would filled cups of grounds with hot water. We then stuck our noses right down next to it, caught a good whiff and wrote down our thoughts.
Next came the break, another smelling session, but this time the grounds that had settled at the top of the water were broken up with a spoon and sort of fluffed to bring about a new smell.
So, after three steps of smelling four different coffees, we were getting to the good stuff. The next three notations were about putting the coffee into your mouth! Yes! The CC employees carefully scraped the grounds from each cup. They then instructed us that tasting coffee wasn’t your typical sipping slowly and savoring the warmth. Instead were instructed that, taking a bit off coffee with a tasting spoon, we should slurp and suck the coffee into our mouth so that the flavor coated the entirety of the inside of our mouth. From there we were to note on the final items. Brightness, is a fancy term for acidity, it is listed in relationship to various fruits or other tangy flavors. Next is Body which is the feeling that the coffee has in your mouth. It’s the viscosity or thickness on the tongue. the example that they gave was the feeling of whole milk in your mouth, compared to water. And finally, Flavor, which is your entire perception of the coffee. Pulling all the items from before together, because they all factor in on the flavor.
So, what ensued next was a veritable cacophone of slurps and sucks. It was amazing, a choir of splashing all around the room as folks tasted, noted, tasted again and then moved on to the next.
After our final notes. we debriefed by sharing our results and voting for our favorite coffees. My husband and I were surprised to find that we both had written down baby poop/baby wipes for the flavor of the third coffee (they said to be honest!). Being married is weird. But we were told by the experts that we were not the first to say this about that particular coffee.
Following the cupping we strolled back through the roasting facility and went on our way, back to work. If you find yourself with a Friday morning with nothing to do, I highly recommend catching one of the Couter Culture Cuppings, fun, educational and delicious!
