The cold front has arrived, not half an hour ago. Preceding it was unseasonal rainstorms. It's a wet, very cold night. The house is shuddering in the wind that's howling over the edge of the escarpment, into the lowveld. The neighbour's wind chime is clamouring for attention, champing at a hollow metallic bit.
Coffee time.
"Coffee, which makes the politician wise, / And see through all things with his half shut eyes." - Alexander Pope
3 comments:
Ah, at last you took my advise.. that wonderful cup of coffee. :)
Well, I'm glad to see you fixed the word 'prentious' (???) to 'pretentious' in your right side panel, dearest Word-spelling Fanatic! See, I'm not so blind.. haha! Charles, your blog is great.. really. So far, I've not come across anything to give you constructive crit on. It's all good. Keep it up.
Nothing like having an article commissioned - and then killed by an editor. So here's one for you, Charles:
COFFEE ANYONE?
Martin Hatchuel
LIKE YOUR CAFFEINE STRAIGHT UP? THINK YOU COULD HANDLE ELEVEN CUPS AT ONE SITTING?
Eleven cups of coffee in less than two hours - and no spittoon - and you wonder why I’m bouncing off the walls? Why I’m erratic? Manic?
Eleven cups of coffee - and they call this work?
Let me explain: restaurants, good restaurants, the kind of restaurants I like to visit, put a lot of store by the quality of the coffee they serve. So I wasn’t surprised when Febena van der Westhuizen, a manager at Knysna’s 34 Degrees South, invited me to a coffee cupping. Which is that thing that restaurant people do when they’re having angst-ridden moments about charging us what they do for what some of them - but, admittedly, less and less of them - pass off as ‘coffee.’
In other words, Febes wanted to be sure that she was serving the best.
It’s a lot like a wine tasting, a coffee cupping. Except that I behave very differently after a few glasses of wine: I start to snore. Gently, of course, and with studied elegance.
Six tasters, six freshly brewed samples, six bowls of ground coffee beans, six bowls of whole coffee beans. And, what with tasting and re-tasting, eleven cups of coffee. Each. Oh, and plenty of water to wash out our mouths (about as effective as washing diesel out of a plastic bottle: why don’t they give you a cleansing lemon sorbet between courses at tastings?).
I might be wired, but boy I’ve learned a lot about my favourite hot drink.
Funny that: I’ve always limited myself to two cups a day, but never before have I learned as much as I have in this one afternoon of total overindulgence.
And what I’ve learned - pah! as if I didn’t know all this stuff before - what I’ve learned is that the four most important things to look for in a good coffee are aroma, acidity, body and flavour.
But I’ve also learned that that’s just the beginning.
Aroma, the ultimate aphrodisiac, helps us to distinguish tastes beyond the salty, the bitter, the sweet or the sour. In coffee, it allows us to distinguish flavours like floral, nutty or fruity.
Acidity creates ‘brightness’ in coffee and is experienced as a dryness at the edges of your mouth. It’s a desirable quality which shouldn’t be confused with the sour or biting sensation you get from a cheap cup of instant (but you deserve to be bitten if you’re sour enough to drink instant).
Body refers to the feel of the coffee in your mouth, the texture or heaviness, and I’ve discovered that the taste of heavier-bodied coffees lingers longer than the taste of lighter blends. Coffee can feel thin, light, medium, full, heavy or syrupy.
But it’s in describing flavour that coffee connoisseurs really get poetic. Flavour can be rich and full bodied, complex and multi-faceted or just plain balanced (in which no characteristic overpowers the others). It can be caramelly, spicy, malty, sweet, winey, bland, carbony, harsh or watery. Or, as one taster said a little earlier, it can “taste like farmyard dung.”
I wonder how he knows.
I’ve also learned that four things make a coffee great: the coffee itself, the atmosphere of the shop in which it is served, the choice of coffee machines - and the all important ‘barrista.’
The barrista is the person who pours the coffee - a trained and highly skilled individual in good restaurants. But don’t ask to meet the barrista if you find yourself in a joint which serves its coffee from one of those pot-bellied glass jugs, or, worse, one that serves instant coffee. You could find yourself talking to someone’s lawyer.
By now, Mike Best, the barrista at 34 Degrees South, must be sweating: in the last hundred minutes he’s poured 66 cups of coffee for our group alone - and he’s had to keep up with the orders from other tables, too.
But Mike’s cool. Every cup has been perfect, every one of them with just the right crema - the thick, golden foam which forms when a good cup of coffee comes out of a good machine (in espresso rules, your sugar should float on your crema for a second or two before it sinks down).
And what we’ve found, us experts (a wine fundi, a trout farmer, a writer and three beer-loving restaurateurs; how much more expert can you get?) is that that there’s more to coffee than meets our dilated pupils.
Sixty six cups of coffee just to tell you something we knew all along?
Now. Would somebody please bring a ladder to get me down off the ceiling?
HOW THEY SCORED
Febena van der Westhuizen asked six coffee lovers to rate six different coffees based on the tasters’ experience of the beans, the grounds and the coffees in the cup. During the cupping, everyone drank their coffee black - except for the control, which they drank black the first time round. During the second tasting, however, they took it as they usually would - with or without sugar and hot or cold milk.
Judging criteria included aroma, acidity, body and flavour. All the coffees were tasted blind.
After the cupping, Febena revealed that the panel’s unanimous choice - Illy - was also the ‘control’ (the blend against which all the others were measured). “It scored the best in the blind tasting,” she said. “I used it as the control to see if, not knowing which coffee it was, the group would rate it first a second time - which they did. The ratings were consistent.”
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