Hi everyone I hope you are all caffeinated and having a pleasant weekend! Our rainy days have started and it is abit of a slow business day but this gives me sometime to blog and catch up on all of the posts that I have missed !!
cupping
Before I go in to my cupping journey and how I fell in to it , I think I have reached abit of a short term goal that I have accomplished and that is retailing coffee beans, Specialty coffee beans . I contacted the suppliers because I really loved the coffee and they had the pleasure of showing me the variety they have from different roasting company’s. It was the best feeling ever to start shelving coffee beans . Due to roasting and shipment by next week I will start shelving 4 different types of coffees for my customers . 2 blends and 2 single origins. I wish I had found them earlier on in my career as they are such a pleasant company to work with and they value every company no matter what growth size you are . While supplier that supplies stores sometimes do need to understand that us store owners are consumers of theirs and are their customers . Which I felt previous suppliers did not see it as that. Look after the little guys !!!
Tasting espresso shot is pretty something I got the hang of , and I am able to taste bad espresso to good espresso . Espressos has been my go to, to when trying out new coffee and is something I have become familiar with to a point where I can easily get a new bag of coffee and with in a couple of tries I can get the best extraction out. I now have decided to go in to a new type of form of tasting coffee though .
Recently I have been going really hard at cupping coffee. Something I wish I had gone in to earlier on in my career as a coffee shop owner. I got introduced to cupping because I had not labelled any of my beans really and one time I ran out of beans I need new beans really fast. I got the beans from a local store . 250 gram beans I got just as a stand by as I had 1 kg of my medium to dark roast which was a blend . 300 grams of Brazilian santos . I place the coffee beans in air sealed containers which I then place in a freezer…( yes I am trying out the coffee freezer method). Packing everything in the storage container and not labelling them is a big lesson I have learnt now , as now I do not only store one type of coffee bean. Unable to identify the coffees by smell was abit difficult so I thought let me try and cup them to distinguish which of the coffees is which and it would be a great learning curve.
So the cupping began and I grinded the beans, each of them and placed them in hot water. I let it sit for a while and began the cupping process. My taste palettem is not of a professional as it is something I have to train it for by keep on cupping and this was my first time . It really was not rocket science but I could manage to taste the different flavours and distinguish the medium to dark to the medium to dark blend and the medium . This got me thinking of doing it ritually and I decided to start doing it weekly.
One of the cuppings I decided to do was to use the medium to dark roast blend (Brazilian and Ethiopian) and grind them different sizes . Between a pour over grind setting and a French press grind setting to much lower.
The first was the aroma, smelling the coffee and seeing what smells I could get. It gets abit confusing as I have learn smells tend to stick to your nose so you will have to smell something else besides coffee to reset your nose. All this is not for me to be or show how professional I am !! But for me to mostly learn and make different mistakes. My niece has the cleanest nose so I always ask her” what do you smell” and she points out which on smells stronger and it gives me a brief understanding if I am in a nose block situation.
Now it comes to tasted and sucking each spoon of coffee so it sprays all over your pallet. Starting from the courser grind to the finer grind gives you a big difference in the taste . Medium to dark coffee has way less acidity in it but you do taste it slightly when you go from a much courser grind to the the thinner . The courser grind taste very much pleasant and wholesome. It had a bold taste, moving down the line I could tell and taste the difference in acidity and flavors . I did this for an hour and just tasting it not trying to overthink of the flavors but tasting what I know and describing what I know . The whole goal was to not over complicate the experience and try evaluate the coffee from what I learnt from videos and other baristas .
The though process of having one coffee type beans and being able to find many diffe
If you have any pointers of how I could improve my tasting skill and to train my pallet how to taste be sure to plug some references in for me in the comments .
When my retail coffee comes I will be sure to do some tasting blogs upon on them and update you guys on how they are going ! The packaging of the ones that I got though is a10/10 thigh the taste of them well we will see !! So be sure to stay tuned
Thank you guys for reading my blog and passing through!! Stay Caffeinated!