ShinoriiJoin Date: 2016-10-09
Post Count: 9 |
「𝕋𝕒𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘」
You are smelling the most complex thing humans consume. When people talk about the flavours of coffee — notes of orange, or hints of clove — it’s because those organic molecules are contained in the coffee bean. If a coffee reminds you of apple pie, it's because of coffee shares some of the same components as food, like lactic and malic Inside that small bean are the same natural components that make flowers smell so lovely, the same ethers that let you know when a piece of fruit is ripe. Coffee has twice as much going on.
When tasting coffee, try waiting for it to cool down a little — you’ll be able to taste (and smell) the most when it’s the same temperature as your Flavour only matters in the context of you. What do you like? What does this scent remind you of? Are you looking for a coffee, or a delicate, tea-like finish? Chocolate aromas, or hints of jasmine?
mine?
Don’t worry if you can’t describe it precisely, or have a different perception than someone else. Even when you can’t put it into words, you’ll know what you like.
You experience the full flavours of the coffee bean if and only if nothing has gone wrong during…
「ℝ𝕠𝕒𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘」
Someone stands by that roaster, all day, a person who knows exactly how to bring the best out of every bean — that ideal ratio of sweetness to acidity, that balance — because he or she has been doing this for years.
Again and again, they repeat the same motion: pull a tiny sample of the beans. Stare at them, looking for the tiny signs of perfection. Smell them deeply. Put them back. Pull out some more beans. Stare. Smell. Five seconds later, repeat the process in a meditation that last hours. Do that hundred of times a day. Do that every day for years.
Know every bean on a personal level. Adjust times and temperatures throughout the day, knowing that 15 seconds could make the difference between letting this bean shine and overwhelming it. Know that in the morning, the roaster is cold. Know that in the evening it’s hot, and you should probably shave 45 seconds off that roast.
Roast just enough to bring out the best and full potential of what’s inherent in each particular coffee already. Roast to draw out things like acidity, floral notes, chocolate, molasses, and earth. All of the coffee’s flavour potentials are presented at the first crack – an audible signal that happens at a particular point when roasting coffee. After that, roast just enough to add the right amount of body and sweetness, without degradation.
Roasting different coffees as though they’re the same? Not going to work. Roasting for colour, not taste? Never this.
Please don’t burn those beans. They’ve been through so much. They’ve come all the way across the world.
「𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕔𝕚𝕟𝕘」
The best coffee grows in the most remote places. There is a thin band that goes around the world near the equator. Within that band, you need mountains, thick old-growth forest and just the right microclimate. Set aside up to four days to get there.On your way there, you’ll pass through Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, or you’ll stand in the endless security line at New York’s JFK en route to distant parts of Ethiopia, Colombia, Indonesia and 10 other countries around the world.
You’ll also experience 8 vaccines (the malaria pills—which can cause hallucinations and nightmares—are the worst), a passport that fills up with handwritten visas, bumpy eight-hour van rides, granola bars and in at least one case, eating the heart of a bull that has been slaughtered in your honour.
The Green Team members, named for the colour of coffee beans before they are roasted, don’t do it the easy way, which would be buying bulk, mid-quality beans on a trading floor in a capital city. Instead, they go right to the source of the best coffee — that farm or washing station high atop a distant Ethiopian hill. It ends when they arrive at that distant farm, washing station, factory or mill. They sit down in a home or around a campfire to talk about this year’s crop with a producer they have met many times. They get to work.
「ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕖𝕣𝕤 & ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕘」
Producers are the heart of what makes great coffee.
Their skills, expertise and craftsmanship are the difference between mediocre coffee and coffee that is like nothing you’ve ever tasted before. The coffee will never get any better in quality once it lands in our hands, after all. We rely on the producers for that pristine bean. A good roaster works tirelessly to preserve that coffee’s inherent greatness.
The producers grow the coffee trees. They pick the cherry when it is perfectly ripe. They remove the outer fruit, leaving just the bean covered in a thin parchment. They rest the beans, let the beans develop into their full selves.
Everyone on this page does something slightly different — he may tend a small patch of coffee trees on the farm he inherited from his grandmother; she may oversee the cherry soaking in a big tank of water, fermenting at just the right rate.
They live on four continents. They speak at least 30 different languages. Some use traditional methods that are centuries old; some have taken out four-year loans to get that new top-of-the-line piece of equipment that will lead to a greater, cleaner cup.
It’s not the easy way. It’s not the fast way. It’s the right way, and it creates the best coffee possible.
「𝕍𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕚𝕖𝕤」
There isn’t one kind of coffee, there’s a coffee family tree.
For hundreds of years, humans have been cultivating, hybridising and perfecting it, and today there are hundreds of types or varieties.
The variety of coffee tree matters—or at least, it usually does. Just as different types of grapes yield different wines, the variety of the bean can have a profound impact on the finished cup.
「ℍ𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕪」
Ten thousand years ago, the Coffea trees grew wild and tangly on the mountain slopes of southwestern Ethiopia.
There, you can still find people performing traditional coffee ceremonies many times a day—one woman will prepare it for the circle of her friends and family who stand around her. She roasts it in a pan, grinds it, pours hot water over it, serves it in the predetermined social order.
The Dutch traders, enamoured of this tradition, brought cuttings of the plants to Indonesia. French missionaries, who also saw the beauty in this hot, euphoric brew, spread it throughout Africa and across the sea to the Americas.
Today, coffee trees are cultivated in every hemisphere on four continents. In 70 countries, you will find those shrubs and their cherry. You’ll also find the farmers who tend them, the pickers who select them, the processors who obsessively convert fruit to a bean. You’ll find the roasters who delicately transform them, and you’ll find the coffee drinkers.
You’ll find the earliest riser in the backpacking crew that stokes the fire and sets the water on to boil. You’ll find the barista who pulls the first shot of the morning for the go-getter. You’ll find the group of 70-year-old men in the diner at 6 a.m., spending hours discussing the issues of the day over their bottomless cups.
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