Damn Subdermal Irritant

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.

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I have been putting off this coffee cupping session for quite a while now, primarily because relatively new as I am to the world of fine coffee, I had never had the opportunity to ‘cup’ coffee and did not really know how to go about doing it. A few weeks back I had a chance to attend a great cupping session at Third Floor Espresso in Dublin and although only one coffee on the board was unknown to me, I had a great time and learned a bucket load about some of my favourite coffees. So with a single cupping session under my belt and a very basic knowledge of what it was that I was meant to be doing, I decided that it was time for me to try this out at home.

Those of you that may be following me on Twitter and Facebook, will probably remember me moaning about the difficulties I have been having with a certain Ethiopian coffee recently, one of my favourite naturals from recent times yet I spent a week and a half without managing to brew a single cup that brought out any of the flavours I was accustomed to getting from the coffee. This was another one of the motivating factors behind the session, I figured that the way in which the cupping process works could help me figure out where I was going wrong with the coffee. Was I under/over-extracting the coffee? Did something unusual happen to the coffee in transit? Or was it something else I was doing? The method for brewing coffee for cupping is very basic and cuts out many of the factors that influence extraction and flavour from other methods, coupling this with the tasting of the coffee over various levels of extraction I was pretty sure going in that I would learn something about where I was going wrong. (more…)