Local coffee roaster Mike Carlson develops his ability to discriminate among various types of coffee bean flavors at a “coffee cupping” class at Moondance Coffee House in Lutsen June 12, 2010. One of the owners of Roastery 7, the Twin Cities wholesaler that provides all of Moondance’s coffee beans, conducted the class. Another will be held in the fall.
You slurp it, then you spit it out, but only if you want to. It might be acidic, it might be earthy. It has brightness, it has weight. Themore body it has, the more it fills your mouth with flavor. It might taste like lemon, molasses, blackberry, chocolate, or cherry, with notes of honey or cedar. It might have a little black tea essence with notes of pepper and spice.
Here’s a description of one: “Sparkling citrus brightness (lemon, strawberry, pineapple, melon) enveloped by full raw sugar-laced body and a mouthwateringly sweet finish (caramel, milk chocolate).”
What is it? It’s not wine. It’s coffee, and the sipping and slurping was done at a “coffee cupping” class at Moondance Coffee House in Lutsen on June 12, 2010. Moondance, owned by Mike Larson, buys all its coffee from Roastery 7, an ecologically conscientious coffee wholesaler in Brooklyn Center. Owner Alan Krohnke, one of six partners in the five-year-old business, conducted the class that is designed to help people develop the ability to distinguish subtleties in flavor and aroma.
Alan Krohnke is so excited about coffee that he inspired this writer, a poor excuse for a Swede who has to doctor up her java with a lot of cream and sugar, to taste the samples black.
The coffee cupping class could have been called a coffee cupping challenge. Krohnke began the class by teaching a little about the biology of smelling and tasting. He talked about the parts of the coffee plant that are used in making the beverage and what is done to those parts before the bean is ground and turned into coffee. He described the five different coffees he would be having us try: Kenyan, Costa Rican, Ethiopian, Peruvian, and Sumatran.
Describing coffee involves borrowing words from other foods and sensory experiences. For example, Kenyan is very bright and acidic, with notes of lemon, dried cranberry, blackberry, and cocoa. It has light to medium body and should finish “clean.” Sumatran, on the other hand, has low acidity and heavy “body,” tastes of grape, plum, and chocolate, and is nutty, earthy, even a little musty, with notes of molasses. It is beautiful and delicious, but because the parchment around the beans is removed earlier in the process than with the other coffees, the flavor can fail if the beans have picked up the wrong odors from other things around them.
Krohnke set up five stations around a table and instructed each participant to go to each one, take a spoonful, and slurp it–slurping it allows you to smell the coffee as well as taste it. In fact, according to Krohnke, taste is a combination of sensations on one’s tongue combined with what a person is smelling. People have varying degrees of taste ability, although to a certain extent, a discriminating taste for coffee can be developed with practice. “Most of it’s learned,” Krohnke said. “Most of it’s repetition.”
After he had poured water over the freshly-ground, lightly roasted beans in little bowls, Krohnke said, “Now we’re going to slurp and spit!” (The spitting was optional. He warned us that if we swallowed, we might get quite a buzz.)
The participants, a small crowd really, ranged from this writer, who confessed that the best coffee drink she has ever had is the mocha frappe being sold at McDonald’s; to Mike Carlson of Lutsen, a coffee aficionado who demonstrated his own coffee roasting techniques on a grill outside Moondance throughout the day; to Kjersti Vick, manager of Moondance; to Krohnke’s wife Laine.
Coffee beans are really just parchment-covered seeds that grow in pairs inside the cherrylike fruit of the plant. How the bean is processed impacts the flavor–sometimes coffee producers deliberately leave some of the fruit attached to the bean or encourage decomposition around the bean in order to create certain flavors. There are really only two basic types of coffee plant: Robusta, which yields more per acre and is more tolerant to pests, and Arabica, which is more laborintensive to grow.
Freshness is absolutely paramount for quality, Krohnke said. Beans can be stored green for months, but Roastery 7 doesn’t roast their beans until immediately prior to shipping. Peak freshness lasts only two weeks after roasting. And “once you grind the coffee,” he admonished, “use it within days–some people would say minutes.”
Coffee gets stale like bread, Krohnke said. If you’re going to keep it more than six weeks, is should be double or triple bagged and frozen. Old coffee gets “wooden” tasting and loses its acidity or brightness, but appreciating that, too, can be a matter of taste.
So with such fineries in the field of coffee drinking, how does something like Folgers measure up? In Krohnke’s mind, the less expensive coffees sold in great quantities in grocery stores and diners have a nutty, acidic, rubbery flavor. They are made from Robusta beans that don’t start out as good as finer coffees.
How does the roasting affect flavor and quality? Krohnke used only lightly roasted beans for his cupping class in order to allow the individual bean flavor to come through stronger. Carbon and burnt sugar flavors replace the natural flavors in the bean the darker they get roasted, he said.
The world’s largest coffee producer is Brazil, which grows about half of the beans consumed worldwide.
Roastery 7 has launched a carbon negative sustainability initiative in which the company buys carbon credits that fund the reforestation of native tree species on former clear-cut cow pastures in Ecuador, support bird sanctuaries, and create jobs. The company has partnered with others in the industry as well as Ecuador’s Mindo Cloudforest Foundation (a project with Krohnke’s brother, who lives in Ecuador) to create what is called CarbonNeg offsets.
“Our current carbon footprint works out to four pounds of carbon dioxide emitted for every pound of coffee we roast and deliver,” a Roastery 7 flyer states. “We are doubling down and purchasing eight pounds of offsets from CarbonNeg for every pound of green coffee we purchase, going net negative to signal our commitment and belief in giving something back with four pounds extra carbon dioxide-equivalent sequestered per pound of coffeesold.” The company strives to get its footprint down to three pounds of carbon dioxide for each pound of coffee.
The company puts its money where its mouth is in more than one way. Theyhave implemented energy savings technology in their headquarters and inform people to wear shorts there in the summer and to bring a sweater in the winter.
Kjersti Vick and Alan Krohnke plan to host another coffee cupping class at Moondance this fall. It would be a worthwhile way for either coffee snobs or coffee morons to spend a couple of hours.
Good intentions, good product, good fun.
More information can be
obtained at www.roastery7.com
and www.lutsenrealestategroup.
com/moondance.
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