It's springtime in Colombia, and coffee experts from every part of the globe have convened in Santa Marta, a small city on the Caribbean coast. It is time to award the coffee industry's most prestigious prize. The taste mavens make ready: Alberto Trujillo is deep into his pre-sip calisthenics, which consist of knee bends and alternating leg shakes. The Tijuanan has to prime his body, nose, and mouth for the so-called cupping that's about to commence. As any java snob can tell you, to cup is to scrutinize the tastes and aromas of freshly brewed coffee. But Trujillo is no ordinary java snob, and what he's girding for is no ordinary cupping. He has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute as a licensed Q Grader, a person who can boast experience in everything from roast identification to sensory triangulation. And he's about to serve as a judge in the annual Cup of Excellence competition.
Alongside Trujillo stands Geoff Watts, vice president of coffee and an unroasted-bean buyer for the Chicago gourmet retailer Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea (winner of Roast magazine's 2007 Macro-Roaster of the Year award). It's early morning, the day's competition will begin in short order, and Watts is sucking deep breaths, recalibrating his olfactory system, waiting for his mouth to reset. "Toothpaste is insidious," he murmurs.
Trujillo, Watts, and 18 other coffee connoisseurs will soon sample the 29 brews that have made it to the semifinals. Ten of these sit in front of each judge, in identical white cups with only a number to identify them, meticulously arranged in 20 straight lines on six broad tables. Each cup holds 11.5 grams of ground beans, measured out to the hundredth of a gram.
The competition began four weeks before, when 513 fincas (farms) from across this coffee-obsessed nation submitted samples of their finest unroasted beans. Now, after marathon tasting sessions with Colombian judges, the contestants have been whittled down to the chosen few displayed on the white tablecloths of this convention center. In the three hour-long cupping trials that will soon commence, a panel of internationally renowned tasters will reject half of the remaining lots. Tomorrow Trujillo, Watts, and their cohorts will rank Colombia's top coffees and name the champion.
The vibe among the judges is more geeky than gastronomical. The majority of them are roasting techs and quality-control wonks decked out in socks and sandals. Now they advance toward the cupping tables, clutching clipboards and calculators. Meanwhile, the heavyset chief judge, Paul Songer, tells me about the future of his noble calling. He earned his tasting bona fides after a two-year program in Applied Sensory and Consumer Science at UC Davis, and he believes that coffee gourmandism has the potential to rival oenophilia's cultish obsessiveness. Watts notes that while the fruit of the vine incorporates about 200 different taste-bestowing elements, more than 800 distinct flavor- and aroma-imparting compounds have been detected in java. "In 30 years or so," he says, "our taste in coffee will match our taste in wine."
Of course, this bold future of coffee is already here — it's just insufficiently blended. The elaborate rituals of, say, a Blue Bottle coffee shop already make a $4 Starbucks latte look like Folgers. But the fetishization of coffee has yet to extend beyond an elite circle of urban stimulant junkies. It will take all the business acumen and marketing wherewithal of coffee nerds like Songer and Watts to see the rest of us through to the day when the humble bean will become one of the most carefully cultivated crops in the world, when a cup of joe will explode into a stratosphere of price and a near-infinite selection of exotic varietals, each as renowned in its own right as Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon.
Everyone in this room is banking on the prospect.
The first Cup of Excellence competition was held 12 years ago in Brazil. Any farmer in the nation could submit beans for consideration. A panel of importers, roasters, and expert sippers selected a winner, which was then sold for exorbitant sums in an Internet auction. Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, masterminded the format, which was exported to countries across Latin America and to Rwanda. She now has her eyes set on Burundi, Kenya, and Tanzania. "Cup of Excellence has completely changed the infrastructure of how coffees are sold," she says.
Once upon a time, coffee-growing countries were focused solely on maximizing the volume of beans produced. But the more that bean quality has affected price, the more impassioned coffee-producing nations have become about divergent strains and varietals. At last year's Colombian Cup of Excellence, the winning beans, called Finca La Loma, caused a scandal. They garnered a score of 94.92, the highest in the history of the Colombian coffee industry, and judges declared that the velvety brew was exceptionally sweet and smacked of clover and watermelon. A 2,000-pound microlot sold at auction to a consortium of international buyers for $40.09 a pound, which translated to a staggering street value of $260 a kilo in Japan.
All this was good news for the peasant who produced Finca La Loma on his 20-acre coffee patch. But it was also good news for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, a nonprofit that represents the country's half million growers. The organization, known by the nickname Fedecafé, trumpeted the fact that Finca La Loma was Castillo, a newfangled bean varietal bred by its scientific arm. This hybrid had been designed to withstand the dreaded Colombian coffee rust, a fungus that can devastate entire fincas. At Fedecafé's behest, growers across the country had ripped out heirloom strains like Bourbon, Caturra, and Típica and replaced them with Castillo. But some farmers resisted, largely because they were not convinced that Castillo tasted quite as delicioso as Colombia's traditional varietals.
The Fine Art of Cupping
How to evaluate coffee like a licensed grader.
Cup A 5- or 6-ounce cup is recommended. It should be clean with no apparent fragrance.
Roasting The roast profile should be light to light-medium. (Ideally, you'd use a colorimeter to measure darkness level.) The sample should be roasted within 24 hours of cupping and then allowed to "rest" for at least 8 hours in airtight containers.
Grinding The beans should be ground immediately prior to cupping—no more than 15 minutes before infusion with water. Particle size should be somewhat coarse, with 70 to 75 percent of the particles passing through a US standard size-20 mesh sieve. Before infusion, cuppers should evaluate the dry fragrance by sniffing the grounds.
Ratios Generally 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water, within at least a quarter of a gram.
Pouring Water should be clean and odor-free but not distilled or softened. (The ideal level of total dissolved solids is 125 to 175 parts per million.) The water should be 200 degrees Fahrenheit and the brew left to steep undisturbed for three to five minutes.
Breaking the crust After steeping, floating grounds will form a "crust" on the surface of the brew. Break it by stirring three times with a special evaluation spoon. The Fragrance/Aroma score is based on the earlier dry evaluation and this wet evaluation.
Tasting When the sample has cooled to 160 degrees, the crust can be cleared and coffee can be taken into the mouth, covering as much of the tongue and upper palate as possible. (Expectorate the sample—do not swallow.) Flavor and aftertaste are rated at this point. At around 150 degrees, the acidity and body are graded, as well as the balance. (This is how well the flavor, aftertaste, acidity, and body fit together.) As the brew approaches room temperature, sweetness and uniformity are evaluated. So is "clean cup," the absence of interfering negative impressions. The points are tallied up, and the overall score is assigned.
Illustrations: Luke Shuman
Soon after Finca La Loma's victory, dark rumors began to circulate suggesting that the winning bean was in fact a Caturra strain, delicate and vulnerable to coffee rust but renowned for taste. This was no picayune point of contention, for Colombia had recently registered its lowest level of coffee production in more than three decades. Castillo was supposed to save the industry from what The New York Times dubbed "peak coffee." Now the Fedecafè9's creation had been besmirched.
Cafecert, an independent coffee auditor, examined the disputed results, and while it could have deployed near-infrared spectrometry to differentiate between the chemical makeup of Caturra and Castillo, the auditors opted instead to visit the finca and count coffee trees. At which point the truth emerged: The Finca La Loma blend was about 30 percent Castillo—not the PR coup Fedecafé was hoping for, but not totally embarrassing either. The international scandal fizzled into a low-grade brew-haha, but it illustrated just how much the Cup of Excellence has come to matter to the growers, buyers, and comandantes who inhabit this new universe of coffee.
Caturra and Castillo comprise but two of the 100 or so varietals that crowd the genus Coffea, but genetics is hardly the sole determinant of flavor. While the high-altitude volcanic soils of South America shape the terroir, the quality of a cup depends on a host of other critical factors: A grower must choose the moment of optimum ripeness to harvest his cherries, then select among various methods of washing, drying, pulping, polishing, and sorting. At the end of the line comes roasting, more art than science, a job reserved for masters such as those gathered here in the tropics on this humid morning.
As a matter of course, Cup of Excellence competitions begin early, before a judge's palate can be contaminated by the daily fusillade of pollutants that assault taste buds and nose hairs. So at 8 am, the cuppers are already bent over their cups, executing a truculent series of snorts, as though they are sampling Colombia's other famed export. It's a blind tasting: The judges do not know the provenance of the beans or who washed and gathered them, so nothing comes between their sensory apparatus and the dry grounds.
The extreme sniff defines the competition's first protocol, and results are duly noted on the score sheet, which is a rather complicated document. Categories include aroma, as well as acidity, balance, sweetness, and aftertaste, each graded on a scale from 1 to 8.
COE judging boasts a level of internationalism that rivals the Olympics. In addition to Trujillo and Watts, there is a representative from Solberg & Hansen, which has been providing a fix for Norway's caffeine addicts since 1879. There is a Brazilian, two kaffee-meisters from Germany, a young Swede with a very thin mustache, and two Japanese (one with Rolex, the other without).
As the judges snuffle and honk, a line of pretty young women stand at attention before silver urns of water heated to exactly 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Each sports a snug white T-shirt and skinny jeans, as well as a form-fitting smock and cap that bear the Cup of Excellence logo. These coffee chicas play a minor yet essential role in the event, much like booth babes at car shows or Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune. At some recondite signal, they fill silver pitchers with steaming water from the giant urns and march in hip-swinging unison toward the tables, where they perform a simultaneous pour into each identical white cup.
As bean-grind seepage begins, the women retreat a few paces, and the judges set their iPhones and BlackBerrys to count down from four minutes. No one moves. No one speaks. In the still silence, a muddy scum of black grounds accumulates at the top of each cup.
The instant the allotted 240 seconds have passed, the judges brandish their spoons, which have been secreted in jacket pockets or tiny holsters. These are no ordinary utensils: They have an uncommonly deep bowl, the better for judging.
It's time for the crucial opening gambit, known as the "break." Slowly, with unimaginable care, the judges push their deep-bowled flatware through the detritus that has risen to the top of each cup and gently perturb the brew. They bow their heads before each cup, inhale the aromatics of crust and subcrust, then grab a second spoon from the table and with a swift two-handed swipe clear every last ground from the top, leaving behind a surprisingly translucent cup of coffee.
The highly ritualized pomp and precision of the pour and break might give the mistaken impression that international coffee- tasting competitions are dignified and stately affairs. Such is not the case, as immediately becomes evident when tasting begins. It turns out that to judge coffee really, really well, a cupper must mix each spoonful with as much ambient air as possible, thereby transforming the contents of the spoon into a flavorful spray that coats that interior of the mouth. The finer the spray, the easier it is to register each subtle hint of acidity, each interstitial nuance of sweet and bitter. All of which means that when an expert cupper sips his coffee, the sound produced most closely resembles a long, loud, juicy fart.
After years of competition, each judge has developed a signature frequency, level, and intensity. Trujillo from Tijuana gurgles; Uwe Liebergall, a German roaster, executes a high-speed, high-efficiency suck; one South Korean performs a retrograde mouth sneeze. The cumulative auditory effect is like being at a party of fructose-drunk 5-year-olds supplied with kazoos.
Even worse than the slurp is the spit. Immediately following each intake, the judges drool into Styrofoam cups, the contents of which they periodically dump into vomitous black plastic buckets that sit at the end of each table. Lips pursed, faces contorted in aesthetic concentration, the judges gurgle and expectorate, and as the contest advances, a frothy swill of championship spittle accumulates in the buckets. Despite such ugliness, the human percolators continue smooching the brew and scribbling on their score sheets with a steadfast passion. Suck... spit... contemplate... annotate... suck... spit... contemplate... annotate...
Watts circles his flared, twitching nostrils around a black-flecked brim. "Try number eight," he whispers.
Thrilled that Watts has spoken to me—I have been forbidden to address him or any of the judges—I approach an apprentice table set up for those still learning the subtleties of the craft. I stare at number eight, then bow before the brew as I have seen the others do; I'm surprised to discover I cannot detect the slightest aroma. I pick up a spoon and give a taste: lukewarm, weak. Number eight is one crappy cup of coffee, and I can't wait to hear the judges ravage this swill.
"Phenol, number seven!" chief judge Songer cries. "Disqualified!"
Phenol refers to that chlorinated, iodine-like taste available from sidewalk coffee vendors everywhere. No one knows where the phenol taste comes from, although one theory posits that the defect occurs when a coffee cherry has been exposed to too much ultraviolet light during ripening. But there has been no conclusive study. A great deal of coffee science remains to be done, Songer says.
The greatest minds in the field still struggle to understand the dynamics of bean respiration, fruit load, and countless other agronomic, genetic, and production- related perplexities. A strange mix of parietal polysaccharides and propionic acids define the bean, along with heavy shots of protopectins and peroxidases, alkyl-methoxy-pyrazines, and hexanals. Coffee labs map transduction pathways and signaling cascades and delve deep into humic matter and loam, not to mention the endless complexities of altitudinal gradient and shade. Meanwhile, the cause of that yucky medicinal phenol flavoring has remained elusive. "The Geekery is working on it," Songer says, by which he means Texas A&M's GCQRI, which no cupper ever calls by its full name: the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative.
As each cupping draws to a close, the judges punch their handhelds and stare at the scoring spreadsheets. Some pace the room, brains stunned by Excellence overload, lost in caffeinated lucubrations. Eventually, everyone sits and gazes toward the heavens in the long-standing tradition of poets, scholars, and quants. And as the cuppers await the brew muses to grace their synapses with one final inspiration, the session ends in silence.
"It's a challenge to use a human being as a measuring instrument," Songer says. "You can't set them up like a pH meter." Fortunately, overcoming the limitations of human calibration comprises but a small part of the Cup of Excellence mission. The thrust of the operation is marketing, which means every effort must be made to squeeze the most dollars, euros, and yen out of the Internet auction that follows the judging. To that end, the contest brass require the cuppers to present postjudging descriptors of every sample so their hyperbole can be publicized Zagat-style on the Cup of Excellence site, whipping up enthusiasm among bidders.
After each session of cupping, Songer guides the taste maestros from the tournament floor to a small discussion room, draws the blinds, and leads the international assembly through the samples one by one, soliciting comments. All that the outside world will know of this secret event are the descriptors attached to each coffee. But I can reveal the contours of a typical session. (To safeguard the integrity of Cup of Excellence, Fedecafé, and every Colombian campesino who submitted a bean, some brew details have been changed.) Songer asks what people thought of sample number one. "That was way off," the Norwegian offers.
"Yeah," says Liebergall, the German. "Green. Grainy. Doughy."
The judges shake their heads. Next up, number two.
"Herbal, floral," says Wendy De Jong, chair of the Specialty Coffee of America Roaster's Guild.
It soon becomes clear that judging coffee is a cerebral game as much as a sensual one. Mythopoeic capacity may matter as well.
"Chocolate, licorice, and butterscotch," the Swede says.
"Cooked bananas, rhubarb, and hibiscus," the Brazilian adds.
"It had power," Watts says. "Oomph."
Sample three was too aggressive, the judges agree. Four was floaty and clean, with juicy pear and a little honey. Five delivered doses of black currant, mango, passion fruit, plum, and tamarind. Six was elegant but inconsistent. "Metallics," Trujillo declares. "Red wine. Coconut. Lemongrass." Seven, as we know, was disqualified for phenol.
Then comes number eight, the vile specimen I unfortunately swallowed, and I wait for the judges to condemn the blend to the eternal roasts of coffee hell.
"Mango and milk chocolate" are the first descriptors, neither of which sound at all like the solvent I sipped.
"Blackberry and plum!" someone offers.
Someone detects elderberries. Another discovers notes of breadfruit and lychee. The ecstatic similes pile up: tea rose, white peach, crème brûlée. Cherry Garcia ice cream! Rye bread!
Watts raises his hand. "That was — " he begins, then pauses for a very long time. "That was austere."
The following morning, all judges report to the discussion room an hour before the final cupping session. Soon their sniffs and snarfs will rank the top 10 remaining blends and leave standing a single champion — Colombia's quintessential Cup. Songer has prepared them for this moment by continual reinforcement of the tao of taste. "Make the issue between you and the coffee," he advised the day before. Now he projects a graphical representation of the judges' sensory propensities. The charts demonstrate how the vagaries of human taste can be mathematized into box-plot diagrams that indicate spread, skew, and outliers. "Scores into the upper 90s will be possible for these samples," he says as he casts a cold Nietzschean eye on the assembly. "Get beyond right and wrong."
A Colombian TV crew has shown up today, anchored by a local DJ whose efforts to make coffee cupping sound exciting rival a Univision fútbol commentator's fervid attempt to keep viewers tuned in to a scoreless tie. As he yammers to the cameras, and the judgers slurp and spit and mark their forms, I realize that in my haste to report the proceedings I have neglected my own morning jet fuel. The Colombian day has turned into a scorcher, so I slip off my loafers, open a few buttons on my shirt, and gulp a few cups of the finest coffees on earth. Perhaps it's the rarefied nature of the brews that have sharpened my sensory acuity, but the more Cups of Excellence I throw back, the more the roasts begin to open up — which, in turn, leads to more cups of coffee and even greater heights of perception. Clean and complex layers of piquancy dance over my tongue, and I catch delicate edges of Merlot, almond, and scorched prune.
Unfortunately, the sensory high soon turns into a full-blown crash. My hands begin to tremble, and I fumble my pen and grope around the floor for it, sweat dripping onto the carpet. I am like a drunk at a wine tasting, and the coffee chicas shake their heads. Yet another gringo has descended into a xanthine-alkaloid-induced mania.
"Any problem?" asks Yunson Lee, a judge from South Korea.
I shake my head.
"Put your shoes on," Liebergall says. "It may be having a negative effect on the jury."
Bigwigs from Fedecafé have arrived for the gala awards ceremony this evening, along with a cornucopia of government officials and a phalanx of press. But the main attraction is the growers, who have descended from the Cordilleras freshly shaven and permanently sunburned. The scores of entrants wear neatly pressed black slacks, white button-downs, red scarves, and straw hats. One of them is too típico to be true: He sits with tremendous aplomb, poker face shaded by an enormous sombrero and a fabulous handlebar mustache. No doubt his burro stands in the parking lot, piled high with handpicked sacks of bean. Half a century ago, the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach created the Colombian ur-peasant, Juan Valdez, icon of Colombian coffee — and here, at long last, appears the incarnation.
After endless speeches from the politicos and an even longer session of cumbia — traditional music of Colombia's Caribbean coast — it's time to announce the Cup of Excellence grand-prize winner. Of course, the winning coffee turns out to have been submitted by the Juan Valdez doppelgänger. His name is Arnulfo Leguizamo, and his beans possess the acidity of passion fruit marked by splendid notes of apricot, lemongrass, jasmine, and tamarind. The liquor has a creamy, lingering, caramel flavor mellowed by hints of wild honey — and brings home a whopping score of 94.05.
I manage to push my way through the scrum that immediately encloses the champion grower, who is being pestered by Japanese buyers, European roasters, and scads of photo-op-seeking coffee chicas. But in the great tradition of Hollywood producers who find themselves in possession of an Oscar, Señor Leguizamo's first priority is his cell phone. Everyone else has to wait. Even the chicas.
When I finally get the champ's attention, I ask what will he do with all that dinero heading his way, and he looks over the teeming crowd, eyes moist with emotion. Perhaps he is recalling how, high in the mountains of Teruel, he harvested his Caturra, washed the cherries with cool spring water, and dried them in the sun, as did his father, as did the ancients.
"Thank God and the Virgin Mary," Leguizamo says. "Now I can pay my debts."
And what about a repeat performance? The peasant has no comment, but a few weeks later word comes that Arnulfo Leguizamo is nurturing a different kind of coffee tree on the finca this year, something special from the techs at Fedecafé: a variety called Castillo.
Frederick Kaufman is the author of A Short History of the American Stomach and blogs at americanstomach.com.
