#3: The Best Cup of Coffee I've Ever Had

Last week's episode was about scientific definitions and those are very rigid. There's no argument to be made about how a yeast or bacteria uses oxygen. It's not my opinion that fermentations are anaerobic. That's just how they've been defined by biology. And I think that if we in the specialty coffee industry want to use biological terms

I think we should respect the definitions that they have already been given and not make up our own. So last week we focused on a small topic and in this episode I want to pull back the lens and look at a broader picture. So in this work that I do, one paradox became very apparent to me. The paradox is that coffee is both ubiquitous and anonymous.

Ubiquitous meaning many people in the world drink coffee every day. Coffee shops are abundant. Coffee is a daily part of many people's lives, and it's anonymous because we know so little about this beverage. In episode one, you know, few people know that it is a fruit, that it is a seed that we drink, that fermentation is part of a process.

We rarely know where the coffee was grown or by whom, or how much time it takes for the coffee seeds to get from one end of the world where they're grown, to travel on an ocean in container ships to their eventual destination in our cup. It's a lot more common for wine enthusiasts to be able to tell you that they prefer Pinot Noir over Cabernet Sauvignon, or to go on and on about how much they love Riesling and how much they prefer Riesling from Germany.

versus Alsace versus the Pacific Northwest, etc. Very few coffee enthusiasts can name a handful of coffee cultivars and give you their preference. That's just not how we talk about coffee yet. Another thing that we know very little about is the cost of production and what we are paying for when we purchase a cup of coffee. When we pay for something, we can think of the price or we can think of the value.

So this week I want to talk about quality and value. And I think these two terms are subjective, but also very important to our understanding of what goes into making coffee.

So to illustrate this, I want to share the story of the best cup of coffee I've ever had. The best cup of coffee I've ever had was sixteen months ago in May of twenty eighteen, about two hours outside of Kigali, Rwanda. But before we get into that cup of coffee, I need to provide some context. I grew up in a house with an espresso machine. Every morning I could hear coffee grinding and milk steaming. There were and still are fabulous lattes daily at my mom's house.

My mom loves coffee. It was always around. I remember one weekend uh my mom came to visit me in my new home in Napa. This is after I'd graduated college. And she was helping me put things away, kind of get my my home settled, and she was staying over, but she was only staying I mean, maybe it was the weekend, but I think it was really just one night. As I watched her pull up in her car, my new house, I was like really excited to

you know, show it off. And she opens the trunk as she's unpacking and she pulls out her espresso machine and This woman brought her own espresso machine to my house for one night because She she knew that I didn't drink coffee, she knew there wouldn't be anything there, and she you know, she's always prepared. And never mind that there was like a Pete's coffee a few blocks away. So my mom is she takes travel gear to a whole new level.

Tell you another story about my mom so that you really understand how much she loves coffee. Um, it was on Mother's Day and we were having brunch in the San Francisco Ferry building. We'd had a beautiful brunch, we'd had a beautiful morning and the family, myself, I have a younger brother and a younger sister and my dad and we were all ready to We were ready to go home. But my mom wanted a coffee after her brunch, and not just any coffee, she wanted a blue bottle coffee.

I want you to imagine the line at a blue bottle cafe at the San Francisco Ferry Building on a Mothers Day Sunday. It was epic. I swear if it had been any other day of the year, the rest of us would have just vetoed her and just like said, You're gonna get a coffee somewhere else But it was Mother's Day, so the five of us stood in line for almost forty minutes for her to get a coffee. And I don't think anyone else got a coffee that day. We just waited in line for this one cup of coffee.

So I had these constant examples of the specialness, the relationship, the joys of a cup of coffee could bring. But I waited a long time to start drinking coffee. Um, in Two thousand eight, the recession, it was a difficult time to have jobs, so I had many jobs at that time and one of the jobs I had was opening a cafe in the financial district in San Francisco. And it wasn't like a proper cafe. It was just like a little coffee like alcove in a building that was really mostly for the

the residents of the building to to have their coffee. And so I had to I opened and I left my house at about five in the morning so that I could be there at six to open the cafe, which meant I had to be up at four thirty. So I would wake up at four thirty, I would get to my job to open the cafe, and then I would make coffee for other people for about

I don't know, four hours until my you know, the mid morning rush was over. And I didn't drink coffee. I didn't drink coffee growing up. I didn't drink coffee when it was my job to make coffee for other people. I really you guys, I I would not ever call myself a barista. I was terrible at it. I they were very generous in hiring me and letting me make coffee for other people as someone who didn't drink it herself. And I think that also shows a testament of

how much people need their coffee that they'd be willing to just take it to pay good money in San Francisco for someone like me to make their coffee. But anyway. I digress. I didn't drink coffee for a very long time because it just was not I wasn't interested in it, even though it was constantly around me. That leads me to Fast forward, skip winemaking, getting into coffee, and like I mentioned in in the first episode, that I felt

a lot of insecurity coming in so much later where I wasn't even a consumer of of this beverage that I was working with. And to be fair, I wasn't really working with a brewed beverage. I was I was really working with coffee cherry and parchment and working down in in Central America. But eventually I had to taste the results of these fermentations and be able to evaluate the coffee on a quality standpoint.

Uh, so I started drinking coffee and it was really hard for me because it was not part of my routine. It was not part of my Um, every day and so I used to have this alarm on my phone to remind me to drink coffee every day'cause I would genuinely forget. It would be like eleven and be like, Oh

I forgot to drink coffee today. So I put an alarm for like nine AM to make sure that by nine AM I had had at least one cup of coffee. I eventually got into a rhythm and now I drink coffee a lot more regularly.

I don't have the alarm on my phone anymore, but I still have days where I I will forget to drink coffee. But anyway I had this insecurity of coming into this industry, so that's what led me to reading as much of the scientific literature as I could that was relevant to what I was doing, and I realized I had to take the Q grader course.

A lot of people compare it to like a coffee version of a Sommelier test for wine and I'm not a Sommelier, but I'm familiar with the program and I honestly don't think it's a fair comparison and I don't like to use it. But I understand how easy it is to just say, oh, it's you know, it's like the Saumillier. But it's not. Anyway, I went straight from almost never drinking coffee

to walking into the Q Grader course. And that experience is a whole other story for a whole other episode. Um, but suffice it to say, I am a Q grader. The governing body somewhere thinks that I can evaluate coffee based on, you know, their defined criteria. Identifying defects, being able to describe acidity, body, sweetness, things like that. So I do have a foundation in being able to sensorily evaluate coffee, but I did come late into the game. Okay, so back to Rwanda.

So I was eleven days into my eighteen day trip to Africa. So I was setting up fermentation trials in three different washing stations in Rwanda and I had already seen the first two and it was time to travel to the third location which was the furthest. It was three hours away by car. So three hours there and three hours back. Okay, six hours of driving.

So we woke up early to start the journey. We left at six thirty and drove for two hours where the car finally pulled off the road in front of this like nondescript hotel where we were going to eat breakfast before continuing the drive. One thing I find fascinating is okay, so do you guys know how America loves breakfast for dinner? At least this can't just be me, having pancakes or waffles for dinner. I think it's an American thing. Anyway. Americans love breakfast for dinner.

But Rwanda serves dinner for breakfast. So the hotel where I was staying at had a breakfast buffet, and the first morning that I went it was full of like meat and veggie stews and rice and mushroom soup. And anyway, I normally don't have hotel breakfasts, but I guess I was like really disoriented by having mushroom soup for breakfast and I grab a cup of coffee from the carafe on the buffet table.

And I mostly do this to try and be normal, like, you know, having coffee in the morning. But it usually just sits there and then it gets cold and I just usually take a sip and then, you know, confirm that hotel lobby Coffee is a huge bummer. So I'm sitting there. having my breakfast I took my customary tiny sip and Oh my goodness. Immediately my eyes perked up with an explosion of flavor. This cup was fruity, it had this like orange acidity, it was juicy, it was balanced, it was well structured.

Um it was a completely black coffee and yet it had this intense sweetness and the texture was like velvety smooth. This coffee was seamless, like nothing stuck out of it. And I got up and got another cup. But I made sure to hide it from my travel companion who is a green buyer and a seven time Russian barista champion because I didn't want him to know that I enjoyed this like

hotel coffee. It was so bizarre because there was no reason for this coffee to be good. This coffee so it was the beginning of the season when I was there. So this coffee was at least probably a year old. It was last season's coffee. So it should have been stale. Um it was pre ground, so it was just sitting, you know

on some hot kitchen in this like big bulk bag of pre ground coffee. It was made by somebody whose job it was to make the mushroom s soup as well, and then it was like batch brewed, who knows at what time, and then it was put into this carafe that sat on this buffet table, again getting like

cool and stale and yet this cup of coffee was delicious and amazing. And at first I really didn't trust myself because I thought my expectations were so low for hotel coffee that anything would have been good. Uh I also thought maybe I'm jet lagged from flying 34 hours and working for all of these days in a row. Maybe I'm just going insane, like whatever. So I really loved this cup of coffee, but I was very embarrassed and I didn't say anything and I just sort of kept that to myself.

Then we got back in the car, went to the washing station, I set up my trial, and then we drove three hours home and then two days later the coffee was ready so I had to go back, drive another six hours. Um And I was actually looking forward to this because I thought maybe we're gonna stop at the hotel again and I can try the cuff the coffee and then just like prove to myself that this was like an anomaly. It was like I was really tired. I don't know, something happened.

I just wanted to I wanted to have that experience again as well. Whether it was to Have another beautiful cup of coffee or to you know confirm that I had just had like this momentary lapse in judgment. So anyway, do the drive again, we stop at the same hotel, I get a cup of coffee, and again it delicious and lovely and it was just this beautiful little warm cup of happiness that I was holding. So I'm drinking my, you know, third cup of coffee.

and my my client asks me, like, you know, Hey, how's a coffee here? He asked both me and and the The barista champion. And I was nervous to speak up'cause now I'm on the spot'cause now I'm actually being asked and I don't I don't want to say nothing and be rude, but I genuinely like it, but I'm also really embarrassed to admit that I love this coffee'cause La Brice's champion's gonna look at me and all my credibility's gonna go out the window.

As I'm saying this, I say, I think it's very good and I look at the Russian and he goes, Yes he's good. And I was like, Wait what? I'm like, is he just being polite? I was like, Wait, do you like it too? He says, Yes. The fact that he liked the coffee too was incredibly validating and I just I felt much better because I thought I was going crazy.

We're talking about how we were genuinely, you know, surprised, and I don't mean to say that the coffee should have been bad. It's just that the coffee should not have been this exceptionally good. It should not have been stood out this much considering all of those conditions. So then my client asked the kitchen staff if they could bring out the coffee that they used because we were, you know, really impressed by it. And they just

bring out this like nondescript bag of bulk coffee that had been pre ground who knows when and had like very little information on it. Um And so we just said, you know, we like them very much, and then we went across the street and bought some bags because this is apparently the coffee that they sell at the gas station there.

So the reason I'm telling you the story is that it really opened up my mind to the concept of a robust coffee. When I have a coffee here that can only taste good if it's brewed in a particular method with a certain water temperature and really strict parameters on um, you know, the size of the grind, the

water composition, the extraction time. When I have a coffee that can only taste good when it you know, brew it in a specific way and it has to be roasted very carefully to not damage it and when it has when all of these like little conditions have to be in place for this coffee to taste good, that tells me that that is not a robust coffee.

Because conversely this coffee that I had in Rwanda was probably severely beat up on many fronts. It was probably not roasted for, you know, optimum rose curve. It was just probably roasted to be roasted. And it was not brewed in a specific manner, and it was probably not even brewed consistently, and yet I kept having this really beautiful cup of coffee because there was so much

richness and there was so much quality to that coffee that even all of these dings that you can get during processing that could um that do diminish quality did not affect it that much. There was still enough substance to this coffee, that it was not diluted by this process.

I think this is one of the stumbling blocks that I've seen with the methods that I use and with this focus and attention on processing is that we're we're putting this this extra layer on the coffee and sometimes the coffee cannot bear it. Sometimes the copies are not robust enough to withstand this processing that it can require a lot of excess stress and excess manipulation of the of the parchment of the green coffee. And I've definitely tasted coffees that are

You know, it's it's really hard for me to describe it any other way than besides tired. We've tasted some very highly processed tired coffees compared to this coffee in Rwanda that Was probably pretty beat up and um had a lot of things, you know, not working in its favor, and yet the cup still shone so brightly because there was so much substance, there was so much density to this coffee. So when I think about value, I often think of

all of these steps, all of the things that have to go right to make a cup of coffee be exceptional and delicious and give you this really strong memory. Because it's not just you know, a caffeine delivery mechanism. It's also an opportunity for an experience.

Okay, I think I have time to really quickly tell you about the worst cup of coffee I've ever had. This coffee was in Honduras. And it's not because that country makes

inferior coffee. It it I've had some really beautiful gem coffees from Honduras. But this one time I was visiting a client, we had It was like over a weekend, I had a free day because like the coffee that it just wasn't ripe, it wasn't ready, there was not enough for me to do, so they didn't want to bring me up to the mill and I had a a free day.

So I was hanging around San Pedro Sula and I went to a coffee shop that I'd been to many times before. It's really cute, lovely little coffee shop. So I was happy to go there and, you know, work on my emails. So I think you guys get by now that I don't have a long history of drinking coffee and I also don't have a very strong

um urge for it. If it's if there's not good coffee around, I don't need to drink coffee. I will tr I will go places if there's not good coffee, I can go weeks without drinking coffee. Not a problem. So I'm at the coffee shop. I order a cup of coffee and they'd had a power outage and the the barista was kind of getting stuff up and going so I was there a you know, a little bit before she was ready. And I said it you know take her time, it was okay for me to wait, and I just got a French press.

So she brought it over, she brought over the French press and I let it steep for whatever, four minutes. I did the plunger, I poured my cup and it was such a terrible just chalky, dry, ashy, Terrible cup of coffee, and I think the biggest culprit was she hadn't let the water reheat, so they had just had the power outage and I think the machine didn't heat the water up to the high enough temperature and so it was just like

a lukewarm coffee. So the coffee was already just like just barely warm and so my extraction was off and it was just so, so disappointing. And I don't I don't know what it was about me. I think I was just tired and I just didn't feel like being a pain and I just sat there and you guys I actually drank it and said.

I drank it and halfway through I realized like now I'm one of those people'cause I I never was. I was never somebody who, you know, needed coffee just to have coffee and even if there's bad coffee, if that's the only thing around, you know, some people will drink it. I was never that person. And now I had suddenly become that person. I'd become the person who just needs coffee and it was a very sad day for me. So that's the moment that I realized

That's not the kind of person I want to be. We have to fight against all this entropy. And I decided that my motto would then be life's too short to drink bad coffee. So that's where this comes from. It comes from personal experience. where I created this model to remind myself to not settle for bad coffee because another way to say is that there's too much good coffee in the world to settle for drinking bad coffee. So it serves as a reminder to myself daily to not settle for

something that's not amazingly delicious because there's really wonderful coffees out in the world and I hope that it's a reminder to you as well and that it serves you to seek out these beautiful experiences. Because a cup of coffee I just You know, it's not enough to be a caffeine delivery mechanism. I think it can be so much more than that. But we have to put a little bit of effort into finding these coffees because settling for the lowest common denominator

is very easy and it's very tempting and when it's four thirty in the morning and you're going to work, I I get it. Um but that's not all of the time that we drink coffees. So I hope that this serves as a reminder for you as well. Thank you so much for listening and remember life's too short to drink back.