Blue Bottle Coffee Sunday "Cupping"
Blue Bottle Coffee, one of the boutique coffee roasters in the Bay Area, hosts public "cuppings" every Tuesday and Sunday. I knew "cupping" meant some kind of tasting, but the experience they led us through was much more educational.
It turns out that coffee roasters do "cuppings" every day to taste their own coffees and to select new ones to purchase. Today's cupping was special, because they were all beans from Honduras, and they all reached the top official rankings of connoisseur tasters. Blue Bottle was about to bid on these in the marketplace.
The cupping room is just to the side of their cafe, with views onto the roasting facility. Today there were about 5 "students" including myself. There were six coffees we were going to taste. But first, we had to smell the coffee grounds themselves.
Next, our barista Vien poured water into the cups with the grounds in them, and then we smelled the grounds wet. Kind of reminded me of how we evaluated laundry detergents: neat product (smell the liquid in the bottle), wet odor (smell the clothes as the come out of the washing machine), dry odor (smell the clothes out of the dryer).
Finally we got to taste the coffees, with these specially designed cupping spoons. They are more concave than most spoons. We were instructed to slurp the coffees loudly to aerolize the flavors.
Each variety had two cups to taste - this was to see if there are any variations even between two cups of coffee from the same bean. It's bad if there are big inconsistencies, but Vien explained that there are variations that are inevitable with each bean being naturally different from each other
We were told to cycle through the group as many times as we wanted to formulate an opinion. When it came time to choose our favorites, my favorite was one that everyone else voted as their least favorite. But then Vien revealed the rankings from the connoisseurs - mine was rated number one! He said that it was going to be too pricey for them to buy, and that large Japanese companies such as UCC with many different product offerings would probably buy the top varieties. I know UCC only from vending machine coffee, but I guess they have other product lines that are more exclusive!
The public cupping tops my list of food-related activities so far. I highly recommend this to anyone visiting the Bay Area for a few days, and mandatory for anyone even remotely interested in coffee who lives here. It is educational, fun, and best of all, free. It's definitely off the beaten path, being in the Jack London Square area of Oakland. But that might make it even a bit more special.
