How many defected beans in a cup before you taste it?

At the roastery we have a great dry processed coffee from Santa Alina in Brazil. The only drawback is that it comes with it’s fair share of unripes. So each time we roast this bean we spend some time picking unripes and defects from the cooling tray. As you probably know they stand out by being of a lighter colour than the rest. As we are a small specialty roaster we can take the time to pick out these and just to keep reminding ourselves of the importance of removing them we keep them and once in a while cup them.

But we have asked ourselves the question: How many defects can you have in a cup before it ruins it?

Today was the day to put this to the test. We picked a clean coffee (La Montanita CoE, El Salvador) as a control and a base to add the defect beans into. We set up the cupping table with six cups. One was a clean cup of La Montanita, the next we added one defected bean into, then two into the next and so on until the last cup which had five.

For our cupping cups we measure 12 grams of coffee to be within the ratio of 55 grams to 1 litre of water. Each defect bean weighed around .2 grams. This means that the ratio of bad beans to good ranged from roughly 60:1 to 12:1 in favor of the good beans.

Todays panel of cuppers consisted of the usual supects: Tim Varney, Tim Wendelboe and myself.

Personally, after tasting a cup of defect beans several times before I thought this would be an easy match. I was wrong…

We blindcupped the six cups and none of us got them all right. In fact Tim V and Tim W only got the cup with the most defects and the control cup right. Myself I got none spot on, but were able to distinguish them roughly. The challenge seemed to get the better of us. For instance we all thought cup number one had a definite taste of defected bean in it but it proved to contain only one.

This is the cup with 5 defect beans. The horror!

Tim W was suprised over how difficult it was to pinpoint them excactly, and I could not come over the shock of not getting even one cup right.

In conclusion we agreed on that the actual taste of defect in the cup would probably have more to do with the type of defect than the amount of defected beans in the cup.

Storage experiment part 4: The last cupping

So today it’s been 4 weeks since we started the experiment and it was time for the last cupping. We’ve changed our cupping schedule from 14.00-15.00 (2 pm to 3 pm) to 16.00-17.00 (4pm to 5pm). This meant that we weren’t in the middle of the late lunch-rush when the cupping began. This in turn made it easier to focus while cupping.

As before we ground up 12 grams of the three differently stored coffees and a control sample. We later decided to skip the control sample as that coffee had been roasted slighlty darker and wouldn’t serve it’s purpose.

Tim Varney volunteered to start the cupping and to get his “ugly mug” on the blog again to illustrate our cupping procedure. The other cuppers were Tim Wendelboe and myself.

As dry grinds there were no distinction between the 3 cups. We then boiled the water…

…and poured it onto the coffee. There were a slight distiction between the cups when the water had been added but not so much that we could agree upon one cup being more aromatic than the other.

After having broken the crust and removed the foam we tasted the three coffees and this is were the differences became apparent. First of all; like last time we agreed on that no coffee should be stored this long no matter what method of storage being used. The coffees flavours had faded even more during the last week. But this is where we stopped agreeing. We scored and valued the 3 cups differently, but settled the score with …eh summing up the scores.

This time we gave the cup we preferred 6 points, the cup in second place 4 points and the least preferred cup 2 points. By summing up the points given by the three of us we could declare a winner…

1st place: The freezer with 12 points
2nd place: The shelf with 10 points
3rd place: The fridge with 8 points

There wasn’t that much between the contestants this time around either, but the coffee from the freezer seemed to have an edge. I guess that this coffee would have increased it’s lead if we were to go on for more weeks. But why would anyone want to store their roasted coffee for that long?

As a conclusion for the entire project it seems that it’s better to store your coffee on the shelf out of sunlight and in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks rather than storing it in the same container (unopened) in the freezer and the fridge. But if you are going to store it for 4 weeks or longer (for some strange reason) you should store it in the freezer. This is true for coffee roasted for drip or french press. In case you have coffee roasted for espresso the freezer has an even bigger positive effect according to Tim W (having done a similar with this kind of coffee).

My theory is that the freezing and thawing process affects the coffee negatively but being frozen the coffee deteriorates more slowly than when stored on a shelf. For shorter periods of time the process of freezing and thawing makes the coffee from the freezer taste worse, but over time the deterioration of the coffee stored at room temperature is greater and will pass the combined effect of freezing/thawing added to the gradual deterioration of the coffee from the freezer.

We still have many questions unanswered. What would have been the differences between the coffees after 1 week? What would happen to a coffee that was less acidic? What if we opened and closed the bags every day?

This made us decide to repeat the experiment with another coffee and see what would be different. If you have any suggestions to aspects we should include in this test please leave a comment and let us know. Thanks for reading and sorry for all the pictures. I guess I just tried to compensate for there being only one in the previous installment.

Next week we will be testing to see how many unripes/defected beans there can be in a cup of coffee before you can taste it. We put our tastebuds on the line so you don’t have to!

Storage experiment part 3: The second cupping

Today was week 3 of the storage experiment. The coffees had today been stored for 3 weeks in the freezer, fridge and on the shelf. It was time for the second cupping.

For people reading about this experiment for the first time it’s important to read the two preceding post.

I took the bags out early to make sure they were properly thawed before the tasting started. The proceedings went on as last time, and todays cuppers were Tim Varney (espressobar manager at Tim Wendelboes), Tim Wendelboe himself (coming in to the cupping at a late point but adding valuable input), Chris Kolbu (part-time barista and recently returned from vacation. He came in to the cupping a bit later on), an unsuspecting customer wanting to participate in our daily cuppings and finally myself.

Today I included a control sample in our line-up; a La Esperanza roasted a week ago to the same roast degree. It proved to make an interesting point.

In this cupping we gave the coffees 6 points for first place, 4 for second, 2 for third and 0 points for fourth place.

The jury seemed a bit divided, and even though the points added up to give us a order to rank the coffees in the end there wasn’t a clear consensus. Two of the cuppers actually preffered the coffee having been stored on the shelf for three weeks to the fresh control sample. Their names remain secret to protect them from shame and utter humiliation…

So without further ado I present this weeks ranking of the stored coffee (the difference from last week being of course that we included the control sample, and if you exclude it you get the results to compare with last weeks cupping):

1st place: The control sample with 26 points
2nd place: The shelf stored coffee with 14 points
3rd place: The fridge stored coffee with 10 points
4th place: The freezer stored coffee with 8 points

The conclusion is that the coffees seemed closer this time around than they did last time. The shelf stored coffee still seem to have an edge, but the two other samples are scored mostly equally. The descriptions given by the cuppers also seemed to put all three storage methods closer together and it seems like that at this point three weeks into the experiment there isn’t that much of a positive difference between the storage options. It’s also clear in my mind (even though the two unnamed cuppers inadvertently gave 6 points to the shelf stored coffee instead of the control sample) that to store coffee for this long should be avoided if possible.

What will happen next week when we cup the last three bags of the experiment? Will the shelf stored coffee finally be dethroned? Is it better to store your coffee in the fridge if you’re going away on holiday for 4 weeks and don’t want to throw away your coffee beans? Keep tuned for the final installment next Wednesday.

Disclaimer:
Please keep in mind that there are several aspects of the storing of beans we have left out completely to make the experiment more managable (repeatedly opening and closing of bags, different storage containers etc), and that these aspects might have an impact when you store your beans. We have only used one way valve bags and left them unopened in the different places of storage before cupping them.

Picture taken by Chris Kolbu