Doing Bolivian In The Back Room
There we were, mostly strangers, alerted by email, huddled around a table in a Capitol Hill back room. The product to be sampled was an extremely high-grade Bolivian variety, hard to get. Just a single bag had been a cooperative venture. "Get your nose all the way down there," we were instructed, "and make sure it's a good long inhale."
So in many ways, our first coffee cupping was just what you'd expect. We hadn't anticipated a baby would be there, but otherwise it seemed a bit like a wine-tasting, with talk of varietals, body, and aroma. Currently, Victrola Coffee is roasting a coffee bean called Juan de Dios Blanco, the winner of the 2005 Bolivia Cup of Excellence competition. At $36/lb. retail, it's not the kind of coffee you slop a few shots of caramel into and top with extra whip.
The Victrolans, like Vivace, are nuts about spreading the word about good coffee in general, so cuppings are a regular feature they offer not just wholesale customers, but also people who buy a 1/2 lb. retail. Barista Daniel is the cuppings coordinator, and their site claims a cupping calendar is coming soon. You can also sign up for their newsletter at the bottom of this page.
The Cup of Excellence selections, made through an intense country-by-country selection process that includes Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, are sold by auction to specialty roasters; Vancouver's Caffe Artigiano bought the top-ranked Brazilian entry for almost $50/lb. (They'll be offering $5 cups of coffee from their brand-new Clover machine.) Victrola and 15 other roasters across the U.S. joined together to bid on the #1 Bolivian entry, so Victrola ended up with a single 165-lb. bag, and when that's gone, it's gone.
They're roasting about 15 lbs. of it per week, and during that time coffeeshop owners, restaurateurs, food critics, and foodies (even blogging foodies) are invited to come by for a tasting. Presumably so they can learn to churn out descriptions like this:
Silky on the tongue and clean in the finish, the Juan de Dios Blanco is wonderfully sweet, with layers of orange marmalade, butterscotch, honeysuckle, dark chocolate and toffee.
