A Cloveristic Tasting at Trabant Coffee

I attended my first coffee tasting yesterday, at Trabant Coffee & Chai (the U-District shop). Alexa, one of the baristas at Trabant (at the far left in the photo to the left), led six of us through the multi-sensory educational experience involving words, photos, charts and five different coffees freshly brewed on their Clover machine.

I've attended numerous wine tastings over the years (including the recent, Zinfantastic Zinfandel Festival in San Francisco), and feel like I have a acquired a moderate amount of knowledge about wines, and although I've been drinking coffee longer than I've been drinking wine, I feel like a neophyte with respect to coffee appreciation. The coffee yesterday tasting marks my first steps toward better appreciating some of the finer points of this beverage.

Alexa told us that coffees are typically differentiated based on three primary sets of features: acidity, body and finish (all of which are used in distinguishing wine, as well). There are a number of aromas and flavors that are considered "bad", and a number that are considered "good". She passed around a Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, produced by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), that showed a large number of smell and tastes that coffee aficionados look for. Nearly all of them are well beyond my current skills in discrimination, but it was interesting to see them laid out in this format (and I found myself wondering if a similar "wheel" exists for wine).

The current offerings that we tasted were the following (the "notes" are copied from the placard posted next to the Clover - I certainly could not have come up with these descriptors myself):

• El Salvador Retiro Estate: Balanced notes of strong chocolate and soft lemony acidity. Finishes with amaretto and apricot.
  
• Papua New Guinea Kunjun Estate: Strawberry-rhubarb and smoky cedar. Smooth medium body and rich on the finish.
• Colombia La Planeda Micro-lot: Flavors of jasmine and orange peel. Smooth mouthfeel rounded out by a juicy acidity.
• Ethiopian Yergacheffe Konga Co-Op (organic): Classic profile of chocolate and citrus paired with an aroma of raspberry lemonade. Creamy and heavy body.
• Kenya: A strong structured coffee with floral fragrance and tea like qualities. Bright lemon acidity, sweet nectarine and a long fruity finish complete this full-bodied Kenyan.

My favorite of the bunch was the Kenyan, although I think I was in the minority. "Full-bodied" is descriptor that has positive associations for me in everything I drink (coffee, wine, beer, scotch), as is "long finish". Subtlety is lost on me - in nearly every dimension of sensory experience - and so I typically need something that really fills my mouth with powerful flavors to enjoy the experience. I also tend to prefer tannic wines and bitter beers, and so don't typically enjoy milder, smoother flavors. Several of the other coffees were lighter in body, and they seemed to be better appreciated by several of the other participants in the tasting (one of whom has a fabulous web site devoted to coffee appreciation), who detected and shared various "notes" that entirely escaped my notice.

Among the other things I learned at the tasting (and in discussions with other baristas at Trabant this morning) were:

• Coffee beans grow on plants (that sometimes look like trees), and are, essentially, the seeds inside of berries of those plants.
• The beans have to be dried after harvest, ideally to a humidity level of 12%; they are laid out on drying patios (reminding me of the process by which the grapes for my favorite wine, Amarone, are prepared for fermentation), and typically tested by a coffee farmer biting into a bean to assess its humidity.
• The beans are extremely porous, and easily absorb all kinds of external substances; this is part of what gives each coffee variety its unique flavor (e.g., the soil and climate conditions where the plant grows), but is always why great care has to be exercised in handling the beans after they are harvested.
• There are many different varietals of coffee plants, as there are for grapes used in wine; a great deal of experimentation is going on in coffee growing regions to determine which varietals grow best in which places (sometimes extending to the level of a very small section of a plantation).
• The Clover machine enables baristas to experiment with the dose (grams of coffee), the water temperature and the steeping time; minor fluctuations in any of the above can have a significant impact on the resulting coffee flavors and aromas. It would be fun to try a tasting where a single coffee was the basis for a series of separate brews that demonstrate the impact each of these.

I discovered an article on the Clover in the current issue of Wired - The Coffee Fix: Can the $11,000 Clover Machine Save Starbucks? - that has additional information about the history, design and future prospects for this machine. It mentions some of the new coffees that are brewed in Clover machines, including Los Delirios, a micro-lot that is located at "13° 22'45.99"N x 86° 28'50.45"W, between 1,050 and 1,450 meters above sea level", and Kopi Luwak, "an Indonesian bean that's eaten by a civet cat, then 'harvested' from the animal's dung" ... and which sells for $100 / cup - or $600 / pound (!).

Coming back to Trabant this morning, I bought a 12 oz. bag of the Kenyan (for a mere $14.95) and will do a little experimentation of my own over the weekend - for example, seeing how this tastes (and smells) when brewed on my $80 Cuisinart DCC-1200 drip coffeemaker at home, vs. the $11,000 Clover machine at Trabant.

[Update, 2008-08-29: Tatiana Becker, co-owner of Trabant, shares some of her views on Starbucks' use of the Clover in a Seattle Times article, Starbucks Launches New Coffees for Clover Machines:

She said she doubts the small-batch Clover coffees, which Starbucks will sell for $2 to $4 a cup, will be feasible on a large scale for the chain.]

Comments

[Max]

Fun post! I like the idea of having an expert present at tastings. While tastings among friends are very fun, often times nobody express opinions outside of a like/dislike scale. And, personally, I find the process of translating flavors to words incredibly hard. In contrast, it sounds like you got a nice educational experience at Trabant.

I may have to look into a tasting on my next trip to Seattle...

Max

[Joe]

Hi Max,

I agree that it's interesting to be around - or read the reviews of - people who can use a more elaborate vocabulary to describe aromas and tastes. I'm not sure that my working vocabulary in the coffee realm will grow much, given how little my vocabulary for describing wines has grown, despite years of appreciation "practice" (though I have discovered that the adjectives "chewy", "teeth-staining" and "tongue-coating" have the highest correlation with wines I like ... and, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit (in this context), they probably have a high correlation with coffees I like, too).

Let me know if / when you next come out this way, and perhaps we can sniff and taste some coffee together!

Joe.

[Robb]

Kia ora Joe,
When I first moved to New Zealand, in 1993, pretty much the only coffee one could drink was instant, which as an American coffee fiend I was somewhat flabbergasted by. This was, and still is in many ways, a tea drinkers nation. Though having written that, the growth of cafes and coffee availability has grown tremendously, but in most homes the only coffee on offer would be instant. While the coffee tasting reads very interesting, should we meet again one day I think the scotch might be of more interest to me! Kia ora Joe.
Rangimarie,
Robb

[Joe]

Robb: I look forward to enjoying some scotch with you some day!

Generally speaking, I would prefer tasting scotch than coffee at 5:00pm, as drinking coffee after lunch tends to keep me awake at night ... and drinking scotch does not :-). There were some tea aficionados among the coffee aficionados at the coffee tasting, and Trabant also serves Chai tea, though I don't know whether they offer tastings of it. I would say that Seattle tends to be more of a coffee-oriented community than a tea-oriented community. I recently encountered a coffee-oriented quote attributed to Seattle resident (and Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos: "In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running." :-)

[Carlyn]

You can ad that coffee is a performance enhancing drug used freely by athletes from all kinds of sports ever since WADA once again removed caffeine from the list of banned substances

[Hampers]

I just recently discovered your blog and am so glad I did. What a sweet post!