global cooling?

it's raining here in san antonio. something rare during the summer months here. and it got me onto some rainy morning ponderations and note-taking experimentations. i decided to think toward and play a bit with two parallel tracks: pour techniques for a manual brewer such as my chemex; and how taste perception changes as temperatures cool.

typically, when i use my chemex (which is about every morning) i set up the 6-8 tablespoons of grounds using a sort of aztec-maya inverted step pyramid array. meaning, i poke my finger into the middle and carve out a niche point in the bottom center, followed by a wider layer above it with a terrace, and finally capped with a rim about an eighth of an inch in diameter around the outer top. when my water reaches temp i pour from the melitta kettle (love that surgically precise spout tip!) into the bottom cave and up onto the next layer, leaving the outer rim of grounds dry. the center blooms--as chemex recommends--for about 30 seconds, at which time i encircle the wet grounds with another string of water...carefully, carefully so as not to overflow the center grounds. eventually, the water level has risen to the point that all the grounds are wet, but water has not been poured and agitated over either the very center or the very outer rim. this is built upon the assumption that you don't want 100% complete saturation of 100% of the grounds, which helps ensure that you don't over-solublize the final brew. pretty soon all the grounds are wet, as you would expect. eventually, as the water levels dip i pour water closer to the center and let it all drain down--the whole thing generally taking around 4:30 and producing in my 30 oz brewer about 20-22 oz.

i've blogged all that before, i think. suffice it to say i was looking to try something different this morning. so i thought i'd migrate my melitta pour over technique onto the chemex and see how it goes. the grounds and water quantities are the same, though the setup is basically the exact opposite: set up a little mountain in the middle of the filter; pour your hot water around the outer most rim of coffee and work your way inward. in this method, water actually never gets poured over the center peak (about a nickle's circumference) because the surrounding water eventually overtakes the peak and sinks it into the center inverted-cone the chemex brewer shape forces the filter to make. same principle as above--you don't want all the coffee grounds saturated the same way and to the same level.

i digress. aside from the fact that i was very pleased at the liquid results of my migratory brewing adaptation betwixt apparati, the main show for me this morning was how coffee cools, or rather, how we perceive the change in flavors as coffee cools.

i decided to use the last of my samples of a very nice coffee, one kenya gethumbwini (peaberry) (which brown has chosen to add to its lineup, btw), since it possesses such an unmistakable flavor signature. roast level and profile were typical of my production roasts and where the drop happens in the no man's land period toward the very end of first, awaiting the imminent invasion of second crack.

i set up my mountain in the filter cone and carefully poured water at 200F even over 3:45, yielding me ~19 oz and was, as per my usual ritual, careful to give a "decanting swirl" before pouring.

brew temp was a constant 178F throughout, falling to 165F by the time I poured into my mug. my first sips were at 154F. at that point all the fuss and glory was in the top end acid. no surprises there. as we worked lower, though--into the 140's--the depth began to show and at about 133F i would say i found the "center mark" of the roast i applied to this coffee. at that temp i found the acid and body were in their best balance. or rather, in their best dynamic tension, as complex coffees such as this, in my opinion are always pulling thither and yon, showing you something different, giving you a different angle.

anyways, toward the high 120's the deepness this coffee has latent in it really begins to come out to play: the black currant, the ruby red grapefruit, the overripe thompson grapes/raisins. acid almost completely disappeared from my perception, or i should perhaps rather say that though it was surely present, the fireworks were now well deeper in my tastebuds and i was mostly perceiving these lower tones.

i kept sipping this coffee with similar taste results, thermometer probe faithfully submerged into the mug, until about 102F, almost body temp. i had walked away from the table for a bit to put on a c.d. of one of the kids' favorite bands and when i picked up the mug for my last sip of the "experiment" i was surprisingly jolted back to the acid, something i thought had long dissipated in the taste mix. my only explanation for that is that as i kept tasting this coffee, the perception of acidity had become dulled and accounted for in my brain in much the same way as the midnight trains' traffic horns aren't even heard anymore from my downtown apartment's sleep. but upon return the great acid this coffee possesses was suddenly recalled in glorious splendor from a gloriously splendorous coffee.

my on-the-fly analysis? yes, complex coffees will present different stuff at different temps. no surprises there. maybe this is the appearance of different sugars that dance most at their respective temperature ranges between the tongue signals and the brain synapses. but the disappearance and re-emergance of acidity after i had walked away and revisited the cup was what i found most interesting, and that is what spurred this whole wander-through-the-forest-post.

would this phenomenon of resurgent acidity perception hold true with the same coffee roasted differently? or with other acid-forward coffees? what would be the result if i used a very low acid coffee? how much did/does brew technique affect that? brew apparatus?

just some swimming thoughts as i prepare to swim back out into the deluge of rain we're enjoying and run some errands. constructive comments welcomed.

fruit

people talk about "fruit" all the time in reference to coffee. roasters and cuppers, especially, are particularly vocal offenders. as a retail coffee consumer it can understandably be daunting and a little bit intimidating hearing such nomenclature. to be sure, every area of study has its jargon but coffee descriptions can seem a touch over the top at times. and i seriously think that to be a good cupper is necessarily precluded by being a good vocabularist. with an alleged estimated 800+ identifiable flavor characteristics in coffees it's no wonder the two skill sets go hand in hand.

i know this because as both a roaster and a webtailer i am forever digging into the recesses of my tastebuds' memories for appropriate descriptor layovers for this new coffee or that. and while the bottom line is that in relation to good, clean fruit, good coffees have it and bad coffees don't, truthfully, there are layers upon layers of flavor complexities that the better coffees out there possess in spades. finding ways to capture lingually the essence of a substance that--quite literally--covers that very lingual muscle is an ever-elusive, ever-rewarding journey.

to that end, it makes imminent sense to your humble blogger that having a deep arsenal of "fruited" vocabulary can only come with an ongoing search for, well, more fruits to taste. real fruits. fruits you've tasted time and again (and can thus pull out when it's time to describe a coffee) and fruits you never knew existed. maybe that's the other layer to this onion of a scenario: maybe the reason a roaster or cupper begins to use the same fruit descriptors repeatedly is because he is only eating the same fruits repeatedly. over time, it becomes a little like the (old) adage that when the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

enough philosophizing. i've been buying weird, exotic fruits over the last several weeks with an eye (and a tongue) toward expanding my grasp of "fruit" as a coffee descriptor and refining my understanding of the sugar/sweet components in coffee--or, more appropriately, perhaps, how the brain perceives sweetness in coffee.

having access to a good produce market helps. dried up starfruit and bruised persimmons will never do. that's why--hate to say it, but--a place like austin-based whole foods is so helpful. they've been instrumental in this ad hoc learning journey of mine. not only do they stock a large assortment of traditional fruits, but they also bust out the fruits you've never even thought you've heard of hearing about. and let's not even get started on their extensive line of bulk dried fruits for everything from explosively sweet thompson flame raisins to curious acai and dried goji berries. (can't even begin to describe those. go. taste 'em for yourself.)

you're getting that the syllogism is simple: expand the base of knowledge your tastebuds have around the kinds of sugars that most prominently display themselves in fruits (of which coffee is one) and you'll likely be a more proficient cupper and thus able to identify more readily what is and is not a defect, overripe, etc. the goal is clear. it is to grow and mature as a coffee taster for the sake of unlocking ever more of coffee's myriad secrets. keeping sight of that goal each step will help the careful observer reference and categorize one's learnings into actionable thoughts and processes in the march toward greater coffee knowledge. couple that with a standard tool like the cupper's flavor wheel and you're arming yourself with knowledge at the cupping table that can help you better make those decisions of which coffees (if any) to buy and how best to market them after you buy them. it's both defensive and offensive in that sense. many wholesale dollars are riding on your decisions. many more potential retail dollars hang also in the balance. and between the two of those...you will be able to act with greater confidence as it pertains to sweetness and "fruit" in the cup.