Have You Cupped Your Coffee Today?
Yesterday we were hanging out at the Stumptown Coffee at 12th & Madison-ish when this guy circulates around the cafe, telling people that there's a coffee cupping at 3pm. It'd been almost a year since our last cupping at Victrola, so we perked up and headed downstairs for the show.
Stumptown does cuppings (i.e., coffee tastings) daily at 3pm at its 12th Ave location; Victrola, every Wednesday at 11am at its Pike St branch.
In some ways, it's more of a coffee smelling than a tasting -- you sniff the dry, freshly ground beans, you sniff them again after hot water's been added, you sniff them a third time after you break the crust that forms on top (and try to catch the odors that have been collecting beneath). Finally, wielding a spoon and a spit cup, you actually taste the difference between (in our case) a Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Rwandan, and two Ethiopian coffees.
One of the Ethiopian varieties was naturally processed, which means that the fruit mucilage is left on the bean to dry, before grinding or milling produces just the beans. That's enough terroir to drop a rhino.
Most range between $10 - $13 for a 12 oz. bag, our host Michael said, except for the Rwandan variety, which retails for $29.50. We're not coffee snobs but even we could taste the difference in richness and variety of flavors -- it's the kind of coffee that redefines what coffee tastes like. We detected a sweet hay/alfalfa flavor, which might not jump to your mind unless you've spent time munching on hay and why would you have? We didn't actually mention that to anyone because of the awkwardness of explaining why we've chewed on grass before. We just nodded and murmured, "citrusy."
