Maxwell

Having been preoccupied with this question, its been a little while since I've written a post. Water is naturally a huge part of a cup of coffee and the more and more we look at it the more it presents itself as one of the biggest players in a cup of coffees' flavour. We choose our coffees carefully, buying from roasters whose coffees we enjoy. On occasion we have really struggled with a few coffees. In these instances the coffees were not just a little flat or uninspiring, but were actively unpleasant. The roasters we work with have always been...

Let me describe a manifesto of sorts regarding speciality coffee; a statement of intent. - To bring together peoples involved in speciality coffee, from across different cultural, economic and experiential backgrounds and to unite them with a common language of communication as well as more united reference points for quality and grading. Achieving and improving these aspects of world wide coffee, from producers to consumers, has the potential to benefit all of those involved - This statement is of my own hand, yet it is, I believe representative of the epic and admirable ambitions of the Q program. The Q...

Since writing last, I've changed the title of this post a little. Indeed the conclusion of the last post does itself produce many inconveniences, it means taste aesthetics need to be communicated and discussed when presenting a product rather than the invisibility that was the inspiration for the original title. It means considering what speciality coffee means rather than just saying this is a speciality classified bean and therefore it is a speciality coffee product that you are drinking. It means asking whether speciality coffee is being made accessible if the format that many of the drinks are consumed in...

Speciality coffee is often rightly described as hard to define. Some descriptions are more specific, such as a coffee that scores above 84* on the cupping table. Whilst other definitions are more about an ethos and a general idea of quality. This last notion is tricksy and not particularly helpful to anyone. The cupping score definition I can kinda get on board with. But what really is a cupping score? It's a number that correlates to a taste experience, and that's really what speciality coffee is, a taste experience. A cupping assessment is a reflective term for taste aesthetics that...

I mine the resources of analogy and metaphor rather intensively when talking about coffee. I do it when presenting and discussing coffee to a wide variety of customers and even more so when training people. I wanted to muse a little about the worth of analogy in communication and also about its inherent shortcomings. I want to focus particularly on what is great about the wine analogy for speciality coffee. Quite often in the realms of twitterland and speciality coffee discussions this particular analogy has a tough time, so much so that it is often labelled awful and useless. A...