Five Senses Coffee Blog

Sharing the knowledge

I know I’ve keep going on about it but one of the things that I’m increasingly convinced of is the need for a constant flow of communication between the grower and the roaster in an effort to increase the size of the shared body of knowledge about each crop of coffee and how it performs in the cup. I know that the average roaster knows as little about the direct effects of different methods of cultivation and post harvesting methods on the cup quality as a grower knows about roast profiling and extraction time through an espresso machine.

One day I would love to make a comment as definative as:

A coffee grown at (x) altitude on the sunny aspect of  mountain/region/plot during a high/low good rainfall season that is picked and subjected to a certain type of post harvest method will produce a green bean that if roasted against profile (y) and extracted under conditions (z) will produce a flavour of (insert description)

For me, being able to do this would infact be the Holy Grail of coffee.

As difficult as this may be to achieve I think that we can certainly get close if we focus our attention on specific regions, ensure that there is traceability in the coffee that we buy and we have all the stakeholders (I really hate that word) involved in contributing to the body of knowledge that lies beneath each coffee that passes though each of our hands that ends up in the mouths of the consumer.

We as roasters are trying our best to get our heads around all the factors at origin that influence the cup. We’ve been to Bali, PNG and Sumatra in recent months to spend time with growers but feel that we also have a role to play in making “our worlds” accessible to those at origin.

It is for this reason that we have had Nigel here. Nigel is Jerry Kapka’s son. (from Kongo Coffee). Nigel has spent the last 2 weeks doing Barista training, cupping training and roasting training. Our hope is that some of these knowledge and skills will be passed through to those at origin. Jerry is pretty serious about getting it right – we’ve shipped him a 2 group multi-boiler machine and grinder so that, in combination with the knowledge of how we roast and cup and extract, he will be able to monitor the quality of coffee he is producing though our eyes.

Hopefully this will provide a great platform on which to build more knowledge and get us just that little bit closer to finding the Holy Grail.

Practice. Practice. Practice

Pressure!

Cupping

Going through roasting profiles with Jay