This blog post is long, long overdue (and also really, really long). In fact I did this cupping way back in July. Almost two long ago to really write about seriously, although I did take extensive notes on the cupping and a whole bunch of pictures too. The reason why I want to revisit it though is because it was really fun, and really targeted. I had four coffees on the table, two Yemeni and two Costa Rican. I had been wanting to compare the two Yemens back to back for quite a while, and the Costa Ricans interested me, same farm, same process, different roasters and very different roast dates. I’ll get into that a bit mor later.
I wanted to mix things up a bit, take a comparative perspective and openly compare the similar coffees to each other (normally my cupping tables at home are random affairs, with very different origins, varietals and processes). Another reason was that three out of the four coffees were pretty old, all over six weeks and the fourth just about two weeks. I wanted to think more about the impact of post-roast ageing on profiles, as it was something I had been thinking about a good bit in my preparation for the Brewer’s Cup. A very extreme example and not very scientific, but aimed a palette training, it was an interesting exercise none the less.
So anyway, the four coffees. The first two were from Yemen, Mocha Haraazi and Mocha Sanaani, roasted by Has Bean and acquired by me through my weekly In My Mug coffee subscription. I had not previously tried these coffees so I was looking forward to trying them both. Both of these coffees were six weeks old at the time of the cupping (10th June 2011). Old enough but still possibly tasty.
The second two coffees were the Costa Ricans, both Cafetalera Zamorana Washed, one bag roasted by Has Bean, another product of my subscription, and the other bag roasted by St. Ali in London, acquired fom a friend who had picked it up at Coffee Common in TED Global in Edinburgh. The bag from Has Bean was 2 months old (20th May 2011) while the bag from St. Ali was just 2 weeks (8th July 2011). I had previously tried the Has Bean roast at Third Floor Espresso in Dublin, the cup profile was very light, sweet with hints of orange rind and chocolate. I was looking forward to trying both the second roast profile and the older roast.
Before I began the cupping, I wanted to compare the two roast profiles for the Zamorana. In the below picture, the Has Bean roast is on the left and the St. Ali roast is on the right. There is a noticeable difference between the two roasts. The Has Bean profile has been taken much further into medium that the St. Ali which is visibly the lighter of the two. We will see how this plays out further down.
I set up my usual cupping table, four cupping bowls with empty containers for the scooped off grinds and a glass for rinsing my spoon. Six grams of coffee was placed in each bowl and then a hundred grams of water was added. I started the counter and left them steep. At four minutes I broke the crust and at seven I scooped out the surface grounds. At eleven minutes I began to taste.
And to cupping notes. At eleven minutes and first taste, the Yemeni coffees were underdeveloped. The Haraazi had a faint taste of pine nuts and a fresh resin like aroma, the Sanaani was more tobacco-like and slightly woody. This changed as I made the second round of the cupping bowls. The two coffees were much more developed and were far more pleasant to taste. The Haraazi was huge, big and sticky with a dominant flavour of dark berry fruits, blackberries, blueberries and blackcurrants. The smooth tobacco remained in the profile and lent a smoky texture to the coffee that was quite pleasant. The Sanaani was quite a different coffee, it veered more towards red berries, in particular strawberries and raspberries and had a lovely stoned fruit undertone, reminiscent of plums. There was also a huge funky quality to this coffee that made me think of berry cider.
The third trip to the Yemen cupping bowls was not a successful however. They had become much woodier and smoker and had lost all of the heady, fruity sweetness of the previous taste. They became quite stale tasting as the extraction continued and became unpleasant to drink as the bowl cooled. There appears to have been a very small gap within which these two coffees hit their sweet spot. Not having tasted them previously I can only make a loose assumption that this was due to the age of the roast.
The two Zamoranas were much more pleasant across the range of extractions that they were tasted at. Both started off very similar in profile, very clean and light, with a zesty orange sweetness and a floral finish. The second trip to these cups began to pick out more differences in the profiles. The Has Bean roast developed a much fuller body as the extraction went on, the second trip the orange zest became more like marmalade and the sweetness became more exaggerated and tangly, similar to honey. The St. Ali roast profile began to develop a smooth maltiness underneath the orange sweetness. It was unusual at first, but not altogether unpleasant just unexpected given past experiences with the Has Bean roast.
The third trip back produced much the same profile for the two Costa Ricans, just more pronounced. The sticky orange flavour from the previous taste was much richer, similar to the orange jelly in Jaffa cakes. This was a big surprise for me overall. I had also previously tasted the honey process version of the coffee and that profile was very close to what I was getting in here. The St. Ali roast was pretty similar the third time around, the maltiness was more pronounced this time around, reminding me vaguely of cornflakes, and the mouthfeel was beginning to develop a mild chewiness. It was unusual, but once again not unpleasant.
I think that out of the two roasts I tasted, the Has Bean profile claimed the day for me, even two months after roasting. It was HUGE and very, very yummy. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the St. Ali roast which I returned to a good bit as well over the course of the cupping. I have a feeling that it was a bit underdeveloped, but I am no expert on the roasting process, so don’t quote me too seriously on that, or at all for that matter.
Overall thoughts…well, this is a tough one. I want to be careful with how I phrase this. I certainly think that one should buy coffee as fresh as possible. I would think very hard about buying coffee in a retailer that was three or more weeks old. Buying coffee as fresh as possible from the roaster (or from another vender) is very important if you want to experience the best that the coffee has to offer. However, that said, if like me, you have gathered up a large stockpile (I currently have ten bags lying around my kitchen), I would never hesitate in trying a coffee, or even keeping it past the usual four week rule.
This does not work with every coffee, as evidenced by the Yemeni samples in this cupping, and I have often found myself getting rid of a bag after an obviously stale brew. You will find though that many coffees age extremely well and can taste amazing even two months after roasting. I can name several recent roasts like this recently, Squaremile’s Agoga and Las Minas both shone, for very different reasons, but were incredibly enjoyable nonetheless.
At the end of the day, you won’t know until you try. If you thinks its too old, give it brew. You would be throwing it out anyway, so it’s not really a waste and you might even learn something surprising in the process.
Tags: Coffee, Cupping, Experimenting
