Kifu’s Ethiopia Sidamo Korate Receives Highest Rating at Pure Coffee Blog!

Check out another coffee review Kifu Coffee at Pure Coffee Blog!

Also, be on the look out for a new Ethiopian coming soon–the most exotic Ethiopian I’ve ever bought (so good that I paid almost double for it from what I normally pay. It will be more expensive, but dang good and worth it for a coffee connoisseur!).

JS

Mexico Altura Tzijib Babi vs. Mexico Altura Chiapas Salitral–UPSET

This morning I sampled multiple coffees for my next order, many of which were from Mexico. Mexico Altura Chiapas coffees have recently become very popular, Chiapas being recognized as the premier growing region in Mexico. But, as it goes with blind sampling, I was giving each coffee a fighting chance against the returning champ in the coffees of Mexico by doing a blind cupping (writing my cupping notes on each coffee before identifying where each is from). I was surprised to discover that in the championship round, two fighters remained in the Mexico category, a Chiapas coffee against a Tzijib coffee. The former [champ] has nice mild/milky chocolate with lemon zest and medium body. The latter, however, is more complex, with a grape juice sweetness, citrus notes, a similar milky chocolate, but better body. So…at the end of many delightful rounds of head-to-head competition, I’m actually going to declare the winner by unanimous (me and three other cuppers) decision: the Mexico Altura Tzibib Babi! Look for it on the site soon!

Congratulations to the underdog!

[No dogs, coffees, or children were harmed in the cupping of these coffees or the writing of this blog post.]

Coffee Cup News Reviews Kifu Coffee–Ethiopia Sidamo Korate

Coffee Cup News Reviews Kifu Coffee–Brazil Bob-O-Link

Morning Cup: Ethiopian Dry Processed Korate SO Espresso Shot

Every Thursday morning at 10:00 am I tutor a friend in Greek, a friend who also happens to roast coffee using the same roaster with which I started–a Poppery Popcorn Popper! So every Thursday I’ll brew us up something exciting and typically experimental. This morning, I had some Ethiopian Sidamo that I had put to the side after I roasted it to let it rest for a full 10 days before using it for an espresso (it needed to calm down a bit before putting it into concentrated form for a straight shot). So I pulled us a shot fromt he PID equipped Gaggia Classic this morning and experienced bliss in a shot glass. “Blueberries!” Brett exclaimed, immediately after his first sip. Indeed, blueberry syrup with milk chocolate sweetness and some unidentifiable pungent/spicy notes. As an SO shot, it is the best one I’ve had all year. If only there were a market for this around here! It’s sad that the Eastern U.S., outside of the major cities, has largely not tapped into the world of espresso shots. Baristas around here have simply not been taught how to pull a shot correctly. Quality espresso is about half product, half prep, so the person behind the bar has to be competent. If you ever want to experience what an espresso can be like, just let me know and I’ll have you over to the roasting room for a treat!

Morning Cup: Better Morning Blend

Me--in the morning before my coffee.

The first thing that popped into my head from the fragrance was a yogurt dipped green apple candy cane. Is there such a thing? It definitely has a sweetish (not Swedish) and soft smell. The cup is bright but has the right sweetness to balance it out. [Confession: I don’t like coffees that can only be described as bright, the ones where the only descriptor that comes to mind is “lemon” or the more generic “citrus.” Brightness is great (and without it, I’m usually bored), but brightness needs balance.] There is a racing stripe of brightness that shoots from the front of my tongue all the way to my hangy-ball in the back, with the sides of my tongue, usually where sourness is detected, picking up on the serious smoothness and opposite-of-bitterness of this coffee. It’s like a razor blade with soft foamy handles—sharp at the top and soft on the sides. I want talk about the flavor as apple pucker, but I’m scared you’ll associate it with cheap, flavored vodka. Nevertheless, it’s got an apple sweetness and a brightness that makes me want to…pucker. BTW, Better Morning Blend is a double entendre

Morning Cup: Tanzania Mbeya Mshkikamano

Nice morning cup for a cool, rainy day…a day that I am finishing my three day bike across KY! This Tanzanian has big, heavy-on-the-tongue, juicy body, but it is uncharacteristically bright for such a full bodied coffee. In the cup it has floral notes well integrated with soft citrus and an edge of fruit. This doesn’t try to be a fruity or citrusy coffee, but has nice fruit-like sweetness and enough citrus to wake up your taste buds. There is perhaps the slightest hint of milky butterscotch (not quite caramel or chocolate), as the cup cools. The flavors are well integrated with nothing that stands out as dominate. YUM!

Guest Post by Peter McLean on the Nuances of Espresso Roasts (and, albeit inadvertently, the idiosyncrasies of a Barista :)

The following post is written by Peter McLean of Project Vvlgar. This article represents the out-of-the box way of doing espresso. It is uncommon enough to call it “out-of-the-box,” but not so uncommon to place it somewhere in “left field.” This actually complements an article I have previously written on the misguided preference for dark roasts. For further thoughts, check out Tom Owens’ (of Sweet Marias) two-cents on the “New Classic Espresso.”

Peter writes:

When I first started serving coffee at the age of seventeen I didn’t know much about beans, or roasts, or even what constituted a good cup of coffee. The word extraction was pretty foreign to me, as was ‘single origin’, crema, and a lot of other terms that I now find myself using pretty regularly.

One of the biggest areas of confusion for me was espresso roasts versus an espresso grind.  I knew that we were grinding an ‘espresso blend’ at the shop I worked at but there was a lot that didn’t make sense to me.  What happened if we ground a light roast like it was espresso?  Would the universe explode?

The Problem of Cupping Notes, the Problem of Realism, and Andy Warhol’s Solution for Both

I have recently been asked how I come up with my cupping notes. Do I really taste things like “musty, cocoa dusted over-ripe strawberries,” “apricot syrup,” “sweetness like meringue over cooked bananas,” “damp pipe tobacco,” “leather soaked in apple juice,” and so on. My answer for this probably qualifies as a tangent (hence my necessary category: “Ramblings”), but I have attempted to illustrate the problem, and perhaps the solution, with analogy from art history and theory. If you just want the short answer, skip to the last paragraph.

Art always serves as a sort of prophetic voice in culture. It is, in many ways, an interpretation of culture itself. Art often gives us an illustrated depiction of, among other things, the worldview of a person, and often that person is acting, consciously or unconsciously, as a representative of the people to whom he or she belongs. In the latter half of the 19^th century Realism dominated the art scene. Realism in visual arts was borne out of a reaction to Romanticism, and in particular a reaction against Romanticism’s dislocation of beauty outside ordinary life (fn. 1). Realism was, therefore, characterized by its depictions of ordinary, everyday life, on the premise that “it [was] necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into [everyday life] to be distilled from it” (fn. 2). This meant that all expressionism, idealism, romanticism—anything subjectively imposed on the portrait by the artist—distracted from the true beauty that could be found in an ‘objective portrayal’ of something accessible to everyday life.  And thus realism became a sort of obsession with ‘objective reality’. Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder—just the opposite. Beauty was objective, to be found in the external world. Perspectives and interpretations were irrelevant. Beauty was fundamentally objective. So here we have Gustave Courbet’s painting, “Dead Deer.” Behold…the beauty…

I’m no art scholar, but I find this not only to be an affront to how we experience beauty, but to how we experience the world. Realism seems to assume that beauty exists as an object to be observed and appreciated as such. There can be no expression of beauty, as though we could either contribute to its existence or ourselves locate it in a certain perspective of an object, otherwise neutral. Beauty exists with or without an eye to behold it, or so it went. Expressionism, a reaction against Realism (and Positivism), was aptly given its name because it found beauty (or perhaps angst—another topic altogether) through subjective expression of the artist’s [or the artist’s depiction of the human] experience, and not reality as such. The pendulum had been driven from the ends of the earth to the center of the heart, but unless we deny what we know to be common experience, doesn’t life itself seem to exist between these two poles? Are we not constantly being struck from the left and the right by the crises of the world and the anxiety of our souls?

Andy Warhol’s art perhaps represents a healthy critique, and perhaps a healthy balance, to these opposing perspectives. As you can see from his famous piece, “Marilyn,” Warhol seems to communicate something both objective and subjective in this piece. All of the portraits of have a definite, objective referent (Marilyn Monroe) though they are depicted through various ‘perspectives’; all of them are meant to look real and yet none of them are meant to look ‘real’; all of them are slightly the same and yet all of them are slightly different, one from the other. This illustrates the many perspectives through which the objective world is both perceived and expressed. We do indeed exist in an objective world, but it is a world seen and experienced through many different eyes, worldviews, and histories, and Warhol recognized this. In the words of Glenn Ward, Warhol’s art, which existed somewhere in a tension between abstraction and representation, “is open to the plurality of experiences and understandings that different groups can invest in images” (fn. 3).

At this point you may be asking yourself, “What in Sam Hill does this have to do with cupping coffee?” Well, it’s a bit of a stretch, but the point is this: when we are cupping coffee, what we are not doing is an objective analysis, in the way a geologist might analyze the hardness of a rock or a chemist might analyze the chemical compounds in a beer. Rather, coffee cupping brings together the world of the objective—the coffee—and the subjective—the tasting of the coffee by an individual human subject—and out of this synthesis is borne “cupping notes.” So when I taste “musty, cocoa powdered over-ripe strawberries with notes of smoked chocolate and cardamom,” I am basically saying, “When I see Marilyn, I see the one on the bottom left.” I’m sure that there will be many similarities and many differences when you taste my Wonka Blend (from which the description above came, though I didn’t publish it in quite that detail, since it sounds more unpleasant than it actually is), but there will probably be many differences, as well. The truth is, coffee tastes like coffee. Flavor associations, however, help to distinguish one coffee from another, which is no different than the premise on which the entire wine tasting enterprise is based. Coffee and its inherent chemicals are objective, by definition, but they way I experience them and the associations I make with other flavors are subjective (or, rather, phenomenological). Both are necessary and the one validates the other. But does this mean you will see the same Marilyn that I see when you approach your cup? Maybe; maybe not. The point is not to be “right,” but to be honest and consistent, so that when you read enough of my cupping notes against your own experience of drinking my coffees, you will not only be able to pick up on some of the same distinctive characteristics, but, more importantly, you will be able to anticipate the product you are getting.

So the short answer is really yes and no. Yes, when I cup coffee it evokes many flavor associations that call these alien foods and liquids and strange otherwise inedible objects to mind. And no, I do not take a sip of coffee and have to rub my eyes to make sure I am not chewing on tree bark or pipe tobacco. So relax and be as imaginative and adventurous as you desire when cupping or tasting coffee. It makes it more enjoyable and will help you figure out what it is that makes that occasional coffee really stand out, whether that be aged brie with blueberry jam or brownie mix with notes of Sweet Tarts. Whatever you come up with, just make sure you’re enjoying yourself while you’re doing it.

Cheers!

Jeremy

www.KifuBeans.com

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Fn. 1. Hence Charles Baudelaire critiques Michelangelo’s statue of David—a 10^th century B.C. Jewish King David memorialized in a Renaissance interpretation, which depicts him as a Greek themed hero standing in the buff.

Fn. 2. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

Fn. 3. Glenn Ward, Postmodernism, 48.

James Bond Pulling a Shot

Okay, so…I’m secretly in the market for a pump home espresso machine. Check out 007 working the La Pavoni!