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What if you took a good coffee... and preserved it? A solid 90pt cup. Strong sweetness. Good pleasant fruit. Clean and well processed on the patio. Strong aromatics and a sugary finish.
You find that coffee at origin and then you mill it to higher than specialty grade standards, let's call it grade zero.
You pack it progressively and preserve the coffees, vacuum seal and keep degradation and contamination issues at bay.
A fresh cup, prepped well, preserved on the way from the farm to the roaster. An interesting idea. No sexy brand names, just focus on keeping unique cups as close to the farm gate flavor as possible.
What would you pay for this? What value would it add to the cup? What would the coffees taste like and how different would they be from the same coffees prepped at specialty grade with 5 defects per sample in jute and normal packing?
Labels: green quality, green storage, musings
¶ Jaime van Schyndel 3:47 PM
These days i get more and more the feeling we're drifting away from the espresso brew. That was long our ultimate technique to get a maximum of flavor out of a certain bean.
Now it seems to be all about clover, vac pot, chemex or .....
It's not directly a great problem for me, but the average home barista is sometimes paying a lot for these 90+ beans and their espresso often has way to much acidity, cause roasting angle and origin are focused on different brewing techniques. Don't we have to inform the people in a better way?
How do you see this?
I feel that there is a certain hipness in moving against automation right now. Maybe it's the lack of access to Clover but you can feel a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon about manual methods. I don't care about hip.
As much as it's interesting, it's also frustrating because as you point out the roasts are not tuned to any single brew method and sometimes with fatal roast errors they just aren't balanced. What good is a movement towards or away from any brew method if the coffees are only romantic stories rather than consistently solid cups? More than acidity, tannic astringency due to roast error, roasting raw as they call it is so common here, it's not even funny, it's just sad.
Espresso is where I am going in coffee right now. Siphon is a step on the path and as a movement, I'm not a 3waver or influenced very much by the fads. Vac pot may be getting hip but I still take my espresso just as seriously as I do every method I brew. If it doesn't produce an exceptional cup, I won't waste my time. Our group is relatively disconnected from the community and I spend more time cupping, roasting, brewing, and researching than cruising the forums or going to SCAA events which have little to offer beyond gossip and banter. As for informing the home barista, it took me a year of sample roasting to just get past basic errors, not even seriously to the point of finessing so I think it's difficult. Very difficult.
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