Did you ever see that movie Yes Man? The one where Jim Carrey adopts the mantra of saying "yes" to literally everything? It mostly worked out for him, and led him to experience things he was always too timid or cautions to do. Life isn't a movie where things magically work out exactly as the viewer (you) wants it to. There's a lot of conflict and grey area and weird stuff that happens and needs to be dealt with, but going out of your way to say "yes" to more things tends to lead to good experiences.
The past summer Boxwood has had a lot of growth, new developments and unique opportunities. When approached with new ideas or chances to be a part of something or make something new, we did our best to always say yes, which honestly is probably why things have been so crazy for us. But despite the long weeks and raised levels of stress, it was always worth the effort in the end. The most recent event that surprised and excited us was an invite to a private shindig held by Weebly, the awesome company that has allowed us to create this very website ourselves, located in Brooklyn Brewery. Boxwood, along with a small bundle of other new companies utilizing the powerful website creator, were to be profiled to show other businesses how we have grown an how Weebly has helped us in our efforts to create and share. It was incredibly humbling and exciting to be offered the chance to network and show off our products with pride, so we bundled up my 1999 Chevy Prizm with loads of coffee, crates and bags and blitzed through the Holland tunnel with no air conditioning to set up shop in a brewery. We gave out loads of samples, chatted coffee with new friends, sold bags beans and merch, got our photos taken, participated in a Q&A with audience members and met some incredibly passionate people all excited about what they do. Sipping of complimentary craft beer was a nice plus too! A lot of great things have come out of that night and plenty of other hectic days because we said yes to opportunities regardless of how ridiculous it may seem to pull it off. Whether your business needs a push or you just need to bring some change of pace to your personal life, start saying "yes" to more things, put yourself out there and go for whatever it is you didn't think you'd achieve. Maybe it will let you to sell to more people, or introduce you to new friends, or get you to discover a new favorite band or restaurant or experience. Shake hands, talk, have fun. Why would you say no?
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As fall brings about a new season of brain-stuffing, all night cramming and foggy early mornings, I sometimes feel a bit melancholy that I will not be going back to school this year. Being a recent graduate this past May, I can easily identify with the importance of being able to manage time, form good habits and make friends to help you through all the crazy and usually stressful weeks throughout the semester. The best friend to make during this time?
Coffee. Coffee will always be there for you, coffee won't let you down. It will make you more alert, happier, smarter. Coffee is your study buddy, your early morning and late night companion, your cozy sweater on a cool autumn day and a cool fan on a warm spring afternoon. I sometimes miss the early mornings after a few hours sleep when I would somehow slosh together a cup in the morning as I struggled to keep my eyelids open. By my senior year I was a heavy user of coffee, and I had built up quite a collection of paraphernalia to fill my kitchen with, including three grinders, two sizes of pour over cones, a moka pot, a variety of french presses in multiple sizes, an aeropress, a few different kettles, Chemex, a cold brew system and even an espresso maker and stovetop milk steamer. I had every tool for every occasion, and I had learned versatility and technique that allowed me to utilize my limited time and space the best I could. To any new students or current students new to coffee, I have a few things to offer you as you venture into the realms of college and coffee. Get an electric kettle Before anything else, get an electric kettle. Most freshmen and sophomores are living in dorms without kithens, and even those students with acces to a stovetop will heat water slower than if you put in in a kettle that plugs into the wall. This versatile tool provides you with boiling water in a few minutes that you can not only use for coffee, but you can pour for tea oatmeal and the endless cups of ramen you will consume over the next few years. An electric kettle allows Aeropress, French Press While a coffee addict will somehow find space for any and every method of brewing in impossible spaces, these three tools are my recommended weapons of choice for quick and clean brewing to get you through the day. The Aeropress is by far the most clever and quickest way to brew incredible coffee in a fast paced and tightly packed dorm room. Essentiall a plastic tube, a plunger and a paper filter, this little guy can brew a single cup of coffee in just a few quick moments better than the student union's cafe can and a whole lot better than your roommate's Keurig. This was my go-to tool in the early morning, it's incredibly difficult to screw up and next to brainless to operate. Add coffee, water, wait a little bit and press the plunger down into a cup. Cleanup includes popping the spent coffee puck into the trash and a quick rinse. Easy peasy. The French press is basically the Aeropress's bigger brother. Insert coffee, water, wait a little bit and push the plunger. This method is quick and easy and can make a lot of coffee at once, whether it's for a long solo study sesh or you're brewing for a group of friends, this is a great tool that brews a great, full-bodied pot of coffee that will keep your eyes open very wide. Cleanup includes disposal of grinds and a quick soapy wash of all the parts. Grinder Find time to grind fresh. Yes, it makes a difference and you won't regret it. There are many options, but i would especially recommend a small hand grinder. We carry the Hario Skerton in our shop, it's a simple machine that proves a little elbow grease can pay off big time. The ceramic burrs will last a long time and create a consistent grind that will extract beautifully with whatever brew method you choose. It is a relatively quiet grinder, and what sound it does make will attract sleepy friends from their rooms into yours like moths to a candle. School is a lot of fun, and it's a great opportunity to find a lot of new interesting hobbies and to build a sense of taste. Coffee was my rabbit hole to fall down, and it was something I fell for completely. Take these few years to find a passion, and fall head over heels for it. Coffee will be there to help you find your way. We have a lot to thank Italy for when it comes to coffee. Italians helped popularize the beverage for regular consumption around the Renaissance, they invented the first espresso machine in 1884, and they created their own culture influential enough to spur on the green wave of coffee in the US that is Starbucks. Without the country, I would not be writing this blog as I sip on an espresso and tonic (try it out at home sometime, it's pretty gnarly). We would not have the incredible coffee we drink today in the States. They are driven, they are inspiring, they are traditional.
You know what else is traditional? The running of the bulls. What I mean by this is that tradition doesn't always make a whole lot of sense to those outside of a specific culture; you probably won't ever see me running away from and angry stampede of bulls down the streets of Barcelona, and you probably won't see me drinking bad espresso very often. Yeah, maybe I sound like an angry and naive youth, but Italian espresso, no matter how traditional you may like to describe it, is not good. To me. The way coffee used to be drunk hundreds of years ago is very different then the way we drink it today. Those drinking it never tried to do anything different different than what they were shown; put the green coffee in a hot pan until with was black, pound it up, add water and drink it. They didn't care about taste because they only knew the bitter black magic that gave them energy and let them sleep less. Why mess with something that isn't broken? When the Italians got a hold of the stuff, their innovation was to condense a brew by using a lot of pressure to make a shot of espresso and then add some milk to it. This allowed for a quick breakfast with a jolt of energy and some nice milkfat to get the farmers and fishermen up and running until lunch. It worked, why change it? If you go to Italy today, you will often be met with the same traditional methods of preparation, and the resulting espresso is, well, pretty funky. It continues to be burnt and over-roasted; bitter robusta beans with loads of caffeine are added to the blends to create a charcoal and burning rubber – tasting shot in your authentic cappuccino. But, it's the way they've always done it. Why? Well, coffee has a different reputation in that culture when compared to our current one, and that's okay. The flavor isn't something to be fussed over, it is what it is and that simplicity is beautiful enough to keep doing it exactly the same way. In the States, we've decided to fuss over it, and that's okay too. I fuss a lot, so I'm going to keep searching and experimenting and tasting and not sleeping while the traditionalists roll their eyes at me as they down their morning pick-me-up. But hey, when in Rome, right? Right. I have realized that quantity does not, in the end, trump quality. Producers know that, and consumers know that, but we had a few hiccups along the way to that discovery.
Much of the food industry in the twentieth century in the US revolved around making more out of less, mass producing and pre-packaging for your convenience, to make life, and dinner, easier. Of course this all sounds great on paper, right? We get more food, that’s easier to make at a fraction of a cost – awesome! But wait, what about the taste? What about my health? Over the last few decades, more and more Americans are realizing that the bread we eat, the corn we cook, the beef, pork and chicken we grill is not the way it should be. It often makes us sick, it contributes to our obesity and our poor immune systems. It also simply doesn’t usually taste as good as it could. We needed to take back pride and care in the crops and livestock we raised, go back to grandma’s kitchen and learn how to make things from scratch. Soon, not only is our food beginning to be more healthy and wholesome again, but a new energy is being poured into everything we consume. Small batch, house made, locally sourced – all these things now carry a value that shows that the product being offered to you wasn’t churned out to make a quick buck, somebody took care and interest to give you something fantastic and delicious. This has since begun gaining more popularity in things other than just groceries and restaurants. There was this obvious but overlooked quality that existed in just about everything we used or consumed every day, all we had to do was take some more time to uncover it and show it to everyone. Food, clothing, electronics, automotives, beer, and even coffee – there were things that made certain examples better than previous creations, innovations that made the experience more fun and imaginative. Americans began to recapture that “can do” attitude and start up little business with big potential because they had this tenacity and stubbornness to offer the absolute best that they could with no shortcuts and no substitutions. When craft comes to coffee, like many things, it is fueled by striving to do things better. By purchasing higher quality coffee that comes from small farms in Kenya and Panama and Ecuador with fewer middlemen, we can help farmers and villagers to create more stable economies. With this superior product, roasters and cafes can now strive to do their job as best as possible to offer the most that these precious beans have to offer, and they can show consumers how thinking a bit differently about some things can pay off not only to small farmers and business owners, but also to your body and mind. You learn different tastes, you learn the barista’s name, maybe take a picture of your latte before the milk and crema leaves fade away, and now your local culture seems a bit more valuable to you as well. Craft means caring and it means quality. Go looking for it and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. You can find it in your coffee cup, you pint glass, and definitely on your plate. It’s a lovely Saturday for a walk, go discover the craft hidden in your town today. One of the countless things I love about my job is that I often get to witness or otherwise the cause of an individual’s “a-ha” moment. You know, that moment when you discover something that had been hidden from you for such a long time that when it finally reveals itself the whole world turns upside-down for a moment? Eyes go wide, maybe a gasp or sigh escapes your lips, and a wave of confusion and realization sweeps over your brain matter.
I’m lucky enough to see this a lot in coffee because it’s a product that is so widely understood on one level, which is mostly mediocre, that when really good coffee is introduced it can be alarming that such a definitive and comforting thing could turn out to be so drastically different from what you expected it to be. “There’s no way this is just espresso and milk,” my buddy Tom said as he shook his head in the car. I had just shown him the wonders of a cortado from a local joint, Little Amps, near where we went to school. “No way dude, it’s like, sweet. There’s so much flavor, I don’t believe you that there’s nothing else in there,” he continued in an increasingly caffeinated rant as he took sip after sip from his paper cup, jerking the wheel of his car onto the highway as we rumbled back to campus. I had converted him. Tom wasn’t the first “a-ha” moment I was a part of and he definitely wasn’t my last, but it was one of the most violent, in a sense. He promptly purchased a few hundred dollars’ worth of coffee equipment in the coming weeks, now and forever in search of the perfect cup. My own ‘a-ha’ was found in a night class my freshman year at school. I was sipping on Kenyan coffee I had brewed on a moka pot as I lazily swiveled in my chair, vaguely listening to my professor ramble on about business management principles. I had been attempting for a few weeks to make good coffee in the fidgety stovetop brewer, and I finally splurged on a bag of “fancy” coffee beans I found online and tried it out before class. It tasted like lemons. That was crazy to me, and quickly became much more interesting to me than my textbook. As I sipped my lemon Kenyan and swayed back and forth in my chair, I forgot everything else around me and melted into my cup, sleepy and happy that I had finally figured out the crazy secrets coffee can hide. Nowadays I get to show his same idea to customers as I offer them Ethiopian coffee that tastes like blueberry pie or cold brew that drinks like a Guinness, and every time when I see those eyes widen I get a stupid grin on my face as I think of my lemon coffee or Tom’s cortado. The idea that myself and all the others at Boxwood can help show how much fun and intrigue can come about chasing that black rabbit down the hole is exhilarating. We love showing all of you things you’ve never seen or tasted before, and we love it when you come back for more. I often wonder how many of you I’ve ushered into the rabbit hole myself, and I often wonder what new and exciting things the journey will show to us in time. We all have them. Sometimes it’s the bad (but oh so good) TV shows we watch about fake reality love, the movies we sneak off to see in theaters during weekday matinees so nobody will see you, trashy pop music you have buried in deep on your phone under a playlist titled “Workout Jams 2007” in the desperate hopes that none of your friends will pick that collection to blast through your car stereo on your road-trip to that fast food joint you know is terrible for your but it’s just so tasty that you and your buddies will gladly take a small punch to your pride (and your arteries) to live a little dangerously.
Guilty pleasures are fun, they keep you grounded. Everyone who operates in some field of taste or has any interest in one, be it food, beverage, television, music, writing or what have you, should be able to take a step back and not take themselves too seriously every now and then. Not being able to do so can very quickly lead one to become a true snob – and by that I do not mean just being intelligent about a topic. A real snob is, well, snobby. They sneer at those they believe to be beneath them, chortle at your attempts to create conversation about the thing they know soooo much more about than you do. They try to impress, to flash, and to use really arcane words to describe very simple concepts about things that most people have actually figured out. Enter stage left: Coffee I used to be a snob. Actually, I probably still am a lot of the time, but it’s something I am working on. When I first started getting into specialty coffee I was a college freshman, very susceptible to judgment and surrounded by new people I was eager to impress. Nobody else had ever seen a moka pot or had ever heard of a pour over or cold brew. All the new ideas and techniques I had just read about 10 minutes ago off the r/coffee subreddit online I proudly demonstrated to my impressionable floormates the magical wonders of good coffee and the ritual in technique of pouring hot water of fresh coffee grinds and all the different flavors that could be evoked from this humble bean (pro tip: just say “marzipan” if you taste something vaguely almond-y, nobody really knows what it is and you’ll sound smart). I became the Coffee Guy, and it went to my head. It wasn’t until a close friend straight up walked out of my room because I described a citrus scent as “you’re downwind of an orange grove a few miles away”. I really wish I was joking. That was when I realized I wasn’t just the Coffee Guy, I was that Coffee Guy. The Snob Coffee Guy. You know something? Nobody likes the Snob ____ Guy, whatever fills up that blank, and so I began to rethink my reputation and my approach to the beverage, both my own self and for others. Since this time I have had a lot of time to actually understand much of what there is to know about coffee, both good and bad, and not just kid my way through talking with a lot of cool bingo words. I hope that I can think of myself as more humble in that regards, and I’ve also learned to embrace some naughty habits and guilty pleasures that I don’t intend to get rid of anytime soon. Diner coffee. I work with incredible specialty coffee every day, but that rusty black bitter stuff that’s been sitting on a warmer for 3 hours? I want that. It reminds me of grabbing a burger with my dad after a long day of fishing in the sun when I was 13 or 14. I love it, it’s comforting to me, there’s some sort of old-school-cool about sitting at a diner bar with a cup of bad coffee and a slice of pie or a greasy burger. Espresso and half-&-half. On the days when I’m called to leave the comforts of my bed at 4:30am to open up shop for all you glorious early-risers (God bless you for getting up that early every day) I go through the motions of dialing in our espresso to make sure it’s delicious and ready to serve. That final shot I pull before opening the doors goes into a demitasse and is promptly met with a tablespoon of cold half-&-half. Dopey-eyed and barely awake, I’ll happily sip the not warm but not cold disgrace to espresso as my breakfast, and I love it. Like I said, guilty pleasures can be grounding. They take away from the seriousness of things, they let you be a little innocent in some way, they give off a sense of vulnerability. Embrace your guilty pleasures, even if you feel you might be judged by the snooty purist sitting next to you. You know what? You’re probably happier than a snob, because you know what you want and you’ve taken it. You do you, and don’t ever change, cool people. Last week I talked about the evolution of coffee culture and where it has gotten us today. As we experience the third wave of coffee, those working in the industry and those who are purely enthusiastic about coffee have almost no real limitations when it comes to the question "what else?"
What else can we do differently, what else can we improve, change, or revolutionize? Is it how we source and process the bean? How we roast it, brew it, present it? What happens when we introduce different ingredients of flavous to beverages? In any one of a million ways, we can begin to compare third wave specialty coffee to fine wine, craft beer or modern cuisine. Here we are starting with a pure ingredient as simple as it is complex, and we strive to achieve the greatest things possible with it. Whether that is the beautiful simplicity of showing off all that a single origin bean has to offer, or twisting parameters and making cold brew pour like a foamy beer. As long as it is done well. First and foremost, the third wave is about excellence in coffee, about doing it right and not taking any shortcuts to take less time or squeeze more out of margins. We do it for the love of coffee. This new culture, like many that are being invaded by Gen Xers and Millenials, is getting back to preferring quality over quantity. Our goal is to make the greatest possible product with as little as possible, with a fierce tenacity and stubbornness. At Boxwood this is no exception, and we invite any and all to come and taste what we have to offer and encourage every one of our customers to start thinking about coffee differently. We encourage education and love to welcome newcomers into our shop, our goal is to send you out with happy taste buds and an intrigued mind. Coffee culture is about the people as much as it is about the beverage, and I’ve been lucky to realize how many cool and amazing people I’ve met through the business. Whether it’s those I work with, the people I serve from behind a counter to the people that supply us with an incredible green product - people with incredible dreams, fantastic stories and minds that feed a modern day beverage renaissance. We’re all in it together, and we all love it. Stay cool third wavers! Culture is always changing, and yet culture almost always maintains a certain level of tradition in its roots. Coffee culture is incredibly interesting to me, because lately in countries like the U.S. and Australia many groups are actively rejecting 'traditional' coffee culture and substituting in a plethora of new science, ideas and lingo. Throw out the percolators, chuck the burnt beans, and send back bitter espresso. Cool dudes with beards and tattoos and designer glasses replaced old school black and bitter brews with sweet and fruity 'offerings' in an effort to show how much this legendary bean really has to offer. It's funny, for how long coffee has been an integral part of our worldly culture like wine and beer it has taken until the last few decades for many people to really start caring about it.
Coffee used to be rich with stiff tradition – coffee was strong and dark and bitter and it gave you vigor and clarity, there was nothing else to be bothered with. Boil it in a pot, reheat it, load it with sugar if you were a pansy, it didn’t really matter what it tasted like – if you had to wince to get it down you knew it was working. It kept the U.S. going, as my dad would recall his sleepless nights in the Navy, coffee even defended this nation by keeping men and women of service motivated to do their duties. It was good, what else was there to fuss over? This general popularity of the drink is often referred to as the First Wave of coffee, it was something cardiovascular to the country, no use in examining it any further. And then the green siren called. Maybe not so much a green siren, but a business man named Howard Schultz single-handedly redirected the direction coffee culture was moving in America. On a trip to Italy, Schultz became fascinated at the coffee culture they had developed. Old gentlemen would stand behind bars and sling shots of espresso for hours and hours during the breakfast rush and workers and writers piled in, often without saying a word, down their espresso in one go and were off with the rest of their day. Poignant, efficient, poetic. Schultz was determined to tell his home country the wonders that coffee could bring to their daily lives if it could be captured in a new venue. This is how Howard Schultz becomes the CEO of a small Seattle based franchise called Starbucks. With the new idea that coffee can be a social activity, that it can be enjoyed rather than just seen as fuel was the start of the Second Wave of coffee, and it exploded in the market. The green and white clad franchise quickly swept the nation with countless competitors popping up left and right, all priding themselves of the tastiest beverages and the most comfortable scene. It was fun, a lot of fun actually, but customers weren’t exactly paying entirely for the full benefit of their taste buds, they were buying a way of life, an experience to share with their friends and family. Nobody at this point had really compared or fully studied coffee from a more basic angle, and so while the culture around coffee had changed quite drastically, the beverage itself wasn’t much more spectacular than it had been a few decades ago. Enter the Third Wave of coffee, the wonderful generation we are living in right now. The curious generation that asks why and how, that strives for quality over quantity, the nerds and the geeks. We realized that coffee can be much, much more than just a logo or social outlet, that it can truly be an incredible product with so many mysteries that we seek to discover every day. It can have the same stature as fine wines from France and the experimental nature of craft beer from Vermont – everything can and will be challenged. Taste can be revolutionized, culture can be changed. The fact that we are experiencing such a rich and developing culture that become deeper and deeper every single day is an incredible gift of the twenty-first century, and anybody with enough tenacity can put their mark on it. Next week I will continue talking about what the Third Wave has done and what it continues to explore, until then stay cool people! It has taken a bit longer than we had planned and we’ve been learning a lot through trial and error, but Boxwood is now proud to offer nitro cold brew on tap! The entire crew has been incredibly excited to get this venture up and running off the ground, and the rewards have been absolutely delicious. Nitro cold brew is a really interesting beverage, and it’s also something that can make you think about why you didn’t think about it first. It’s often remarked as the “Guinness of coffee” and has reason to be – the two beverages operate on the same principles and share a lot of common characteristics. Carbonation, as seen in beer, soda, seltzer water and the like is the result of carbon dioxide becoming readily dissolved in a liquid under pressure. When the pressure is released, bubbles of the gas are released from their fluid home and result in a fun, prickly feeling in your mouth and tongue. Nitrogen, on the other hand, is not nearly as soluble in fluid, but we can achieve dissolution by adding a lot more pressure and waiting patiently. When this high pressure is finally released, the nitrogen emerges from the fluid in much smaller particles that carbon dioxide and carries along some of the fluid around it, resulting in a much heavier and creamier body than carbonation can offer. Many stout beers, including of course the wonderful Guinness, have taken to pumping their brew full of nitrogen to bring forth creamier, maltier characteristics out of their already syrupy beers. It adds a layer of complexity and depth to them that wouldn’t exist if they were flat, and would be repulsive if they were bubbly carbonated. This practice has been going on for decades to enhance drinkability and reveling amongst brewers and drinkers, and now in recent years we have utilized some innovative thinking to bring uppers and downers a bit closer together by bringing the same concepts to coffee. Cold brew already has a lot of similarities to stouts in flavor profiles and mouthfeel, so why shouldn’t these concepts intended to add more texture and complexity translate over? Pumping El Jefe up with nitrogen would only make it’s already chocolaty and creamy characteristics even more pronounced and incredible, right? So we did it. We brew our cold brew for twenty–four hours, then we pour it into a keg, and then we hook that keg up to a big nitrogen tank pumping out 45 psi into it and let it sit in a fridge for forty-eight more hours. We pull it out and hook it up to a special tap designed to diffuse the nitrogen gas out of highly pressurized fluid. The tap gets pulled, and a beautiful milk chocolate brown substance flows out. As it fills the glass, tiny bubbles surge and foam in the deep dark ocean of coffee, a white lace forms at the brim and grows gently. Go ahead, take a sip. Creamy, velvety, lush, chocolate milkshake, silk blanket. These are the things that run through your head as you lick the foamy coffee mustache that embraces your lips. It’s good. Like, it’s really good, and you wonder why this thing has been missing from our life this entire time. We're super happy with the results and we really hope you all will too! Come on by for a nice, cold foamy jolt to get you through the weekend, you've worked so hard this week, treat yourself to something special and stay cool! Last week I talked about flavor in coffee and where it comes from. That’s cool and all, but what about the flavors themselves? That snooty guy sitting next to you is going on and on about how his cup has hints of dried violet petals and wafts of a far-away orange grove, what’s the deal with that? Let’s get one thing straight – we’re all tasting the same coffee with the same flavors, how we verbalize it is the biggest difference. Developing one’s palate is at least great simply being able to distinguish individual flavors from the whole profile and finding a way to describe it with words. Two people may describe the same cup of coffee differently – that doesn’t make one of them right and the other wrong, it mostly just means that they haven’t figured out how to objectively define the flavors they taste. Don’t let Mr. Snooty over there intimidate you with his seemingly profound taste buds, he’s probably just trying to impress his date ;) So, let’s take a crash course in coffee cupping 101 Coffee cupping is a way to profile coffee in its most pure form. Freshly ground coffee in a cup is smelled dry, had hot water poured in it brew, smelled again and finally tasted. Tasting involves slurping incredibly obnoxiously from a spoon, exactly the way Mom told you not to eat tomato soup at the dinner table. Make as much noise as possible slurping and sipping from your spoon, this allows the entirety of the inside of your mouth to get coated with coffee to completely envelop your taste buds in flavor. These flavors can span a huge variety of qualities, but for now we’ll focus on a few basic and easily identifiable ones that can evolve into much more intricate and complex profiles. Chocolate. One of the most widely common flavors in coffee that is usually one of the first strong flavors one can take from a cup of coffee. Of course, there are different types of chocolate; milk, dark, semi-sweet, baking, cacao etcetera. Does this coffee taste like chocolate? If so, what kind? Nuts. Nutty coffees give chocolaty ones a run for their money and can offer some incredible strong suggestions in a cup of coffee from Central America. Like chocolate, nuts come in a variety of their own. Does this coffee taste nutty? What kind? Fruit. Fruitiness is where things can get a bit trickier as there exists a lot more distinct types of fruit than their does chocolate or nuts. The first tip to determine fruitiness is often the type of sweetness or juiciness a coffee displays, it can often be described as some sort of fruit. A good practice is to separate big categories apart and work your way down – try thinking of fruits as either dark, light or citrus. Darker fruit flavors exist in things like cherries, berries, currants and other ‘darker’ tasting fruits. Lighter fruits I categorize with things like apples and pears, peaches, white cranberries and other ‘lighter’ tasting fruits. Citrus is a bit more obvious to pick out, as they usually have a distinct zip or acidity to their and can range from lemons and limes to blood oranges and grapefruits. Earth. Earthy flavors are most often the densest flavors you will taste in a cup of darkly roasted coffee, and if the coffee has been over-roasted will appear overpowering compared to everything else I just mentioned. Earthy flavors can include organic flavors like carbon, wood, tobacco, dirt and ash. When a dark roast is taken care of, these notes can smell and taste like sweet pipe tobacco or fresh soil. When improperly handled, they can compare more easily to ashtrays and dark basements L These four categories are not nearly all of the categories a flavor can fall into, but they are a great place to start thinking about when you take the first few sips of your next cup of coffee. Slurp and swish and ponder these categories, break the flavors down and figure out what it is on you taste buds. If you think something doesn’t fit into these four categories, start thinking about other ones – spices, herbs, florals, pretty much anything is on the table! Don’t feel like you can’t have a trained palate because these flavors may not be obvious to you all at once, it can take a lot of coffee tasting to figure out what everything is! Thankfully I know of a really cool place with a lot of great coffee and friendly, educative staff you can go to get a jump start on your rejuvenated coffee addiction ;) Stay cool people! |
AuthorHayden Kaye is our Master Roaster and head of the Say Interesting Stuff department. Archives
December 2017
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