2024 recap (II: taste)
Are you wearing the same beige sweatpants again?
You just got them out of the fresh laundry! Well. Anyways.
The Rwanda PB is once again tasting like a raspberry lingonberry reduction with a little slice of a fudgy caramel cheesecake. Grey winter skies make the day seem duller, but the coffee seems richer and sweeter. Visually the surface seems still but I can swear something in the Tchaikovsky is making the acidity brighter and livelier. It's the first of the day and maybe the last because I would love a slow dizzy day that in turn gives me a fresher Monday tomorrow.
And you're telling me taste is objective? I can tell you about the acidity structure as well. Yes, we could identify the most noticeable traits of this profile in the way we have agreed upon with others. I think you've sipped on a coffee that was offered to you and threw out the remaining 87% of it too many times because you must have forgotten about the complexities of human experience. Very „I refuse to call nutty 84pt medium roasts Specialty because I want that word to identify with my stupidly subjective perception of valuable taste profiles" of you!
Well, Gabriel, what the fuck? Is subjectivism bad too? Come on!
And to that my dear friend I say:
You come on! As in: come on a trip to February 2024 with me.
one of the more covered outfits
working or training
at the
roasting facility in summer
Ah yes, February last year. What a time. I was powering through my last shifts at the market stand as well as Amadeus' final Sanremo Festival and Wolfgang was closing for good shortly before I lead the process in transitioning to batch brew at Kaffeefabrik Wieden. Given the obvious downsides to offering single servings of hand brew at this location the switch seemed like and in fact turned out to be an easy win.
Viewed from the outlet into the sea of a successful Brewers Cup campaign one could look at this upstream rapid from a revisionist perspective. Without strangling myself in a web of false casualties, however, we can neutrally observe that last year brought several occasions to reconsider what might be a nice brew, which is to say meeting or exceeding expectations.
A short stay in Prague
proved a fruitful expedition into the fields of batch brew. If you pick a single drink to observe it is easy to understand how pricing, presentation, brew style and serving size contribute to the overall satisfaction with an experience. The taste. The taste is what we want but often it seems to be more a spirit than a substance. Does the bean match the room? Does the room match the barista's service? Does the service match the presentation of the drink? Does the presentation match the style of brew? Does the style of brew match the bean?
We can find ourselves in strange places. I remember sitting in this chic backyard coffee shop in Prague - that has since changed ownership with accompanied fishy ‘everything is fine, this is great’ instagram posts hahah, the only customer there on a slow weekend morning. Having a batch brew from a bean twice or thrice our own prices from a machine more than ten times what would eventually become our brewer of choice. This place was nothing like our shop. Never mind the slick polished design, I was looking at a raw brick wall rather than a mirror.
one of those things
that shape your perception of ‘taste’
cups.
Take a minute and reread the questions up top.
The answer to all those questions was yes. And whether you're a sustainability focused shop in Vienna serving nice 84-86pt organic beans from actual direct trade with smallholder coops or a slick trendy shop in a Prague backyard serving selected 89ers from family owned fincas: I'm pretty sure every customer can tell if there's a couple of nos mixed in with the yeses. And they will retell this story, only in ways that will shift the ‘blame’ more and more onto the taste.
So after three weeks in Vienna, I was ready to
go back to Prague for a second time in March 2024
and support my friend Daria during her Cup Tasters Championship. What I found was an entirely self-organized coffee festival that any Austrian city would die to have and some very nice moist cinnamon rolls with apricot compote. It was here that I thought to have forged connections with accomplished Czech roasters before they all proved to be the rule rather than the exemptions in this business. Well communication in person is easier and we had a lot of fun overdosing filter samples and talk coffee all weekend. Daria opened her competition with an exceptional first round to prove she got the taste (buds).
Buds and buddies were made in Vienna, Prague, Wels, Zürich, Rome leaving me with my subjectively best trained palate of my career. I saw an even bigger leap in linguistic skills naming and communicating aspects of a coffee in different settings and this, of course, did not happen individually of cupping, chatting and collaborating with many great coffee professionals such as Daria. Not all of them gotta be friends to learn a lot from their specific takes and experience.
Happy slurp in 2025 everyone!