Going to Seoul.  Going to eat me some bibimbop and some kimchee and some awesome spicy, goodness-knows-what!  So, will be gone for a couple of days.  But please, pop back by next week some time and I’ll tell you all about it!  Oh, and coffee!

Okay, so I just did a google search for “Farm Gorudinbiteru Panama”. (This is the name of the farm that my Panamanian beans came from…well, the Japanese translation of it anyway. The English one is “Golden Beetle”) During my search I came across a cool little paragraph about coffee tasting cited in an article by Elizabeth Worley on www.dannypanama.com

There is a great article in Fresh Cup Magazine by Willem Boot, a renowned coffee expert, who often visits Boquete for cupping competitions and seminars. He writes: “Do you have to be a coffee expert to cup coffee? No! Do you need an excellent palate to be a coffee cupper? Not necessarily! What you really need is an open mind…and a healthy sense of curiosity, and you should never be afraid to be ‘wrong’ about what you taste. If the coffee tastes like ‘wet dogs’ to you, then it does. If the coffee triggers a honeymoon memory, enjoy it! …Don’t be afraid to taste what you taste, to feel what you feel, to think what you think.”

Yeah!!! Love that!

Just did another search typing in “Golden Beetle” in English and guess what I found? This cupping report. HERE’S how the taster described Golden Beetle’s beans:

“Flavour of chocolate, ripe fruits, nuts, vanilla
sugar cane sweetness
aftertaste of prunes, with a very nice complexity”

CHOCOLATE?! NUTS?! SWEETNESS?!
Yeah! I tasted chocolate! I smelled nuts! I tasted sweetness! Okay, so I didn’t taste vanilla or prunes…but hey, this is just the beginning.

It’s Monday evening and I sit here retasting my Panamanian brew as I watch The Today Show. Living in Japan, we get it in the evening - live.  About this time of year, watching The Today Show can get me a little homesick.  There are all those people standing there w/ Al Roker at Rockefeller Center in their sweaters and scarves making me miss the coolness of fall and the change of seasons. (Here in Okinawa, I’m still living in my flip-flops; cursing myself whenever I foolishly decide it’s time to wear denim.) This is the time of year in the States that you start seeing pumpkins and apple cider and probably even Christmas decorations in the stores. 

So this year I decided to kickoff my autumn nostalgia a little early by making THIS RECIPEfrom my new favorite blog THE SUNDAY BAKER. It’s full of delicious fall flavors and the smell…ummm…it’s fall through and through. But I can’t stop there. I just found this copy of Starbucks Gingerbread Latte recipe in which you make your own gingerbread syrup from scratch. My goal is to actually attempt to make it this week, a big deal for my non-domestic self. Will it assuage my longing for the tastes of fall? … Eh, we’ll see.

Anyway, I’ve decided to re-taste my Panamanian brew this evening to make sure that I was being consistant in my observations. Here’s what I tasted tonight (this is the same batch of beans I got from Good Company and tasted a few days ago. I didn’t cheat and look at my first post though, promise!)

TASTE:bitter
BODY: balanced, full
ACIDITY: very
AFTERTASTE: strong. Stays on the tongue and starts tasting like chocolate after awhile.
AROMA: toasted nuts

Okay, let’s check back and see if my reviews are the same…pause while I check…Hmmm…So, I guess we can establish that it’s bitter, full, and chocolatey tasting.

No coffee tasting today. It’s the weekend and we were out and about, to the zoo among other things. (Gabe’s first zoo trip!) So instead let me share some of my friends in this coffee project:

Meet my favorite coffee mug. She’s Hungarian. I got her in about 2001 in an open-air market in Budapest, Hungary. There was a ton of great pottery there and I wanted to buy it all, but I was backpacking and there’s only so much dishware you can fit into one of those packs. After ages of deliberating, I got this mug and another matching one and a crazy bright red and blue vase and another, smaller moss colored honey-pot with great blue swirls.

I love my blue crackle-looking coffee mugs. I live in fear that I’ll break them somehow. In addition to coffee, they make for good ice cream bowls.

Meet my second favorite, but increasingly used Villeroy and Boch mug.

Increasingly used because of its perfect size. I love my Hungarian babies, but since I became pregnant and started cutting back on caffeine, I found myself reaching for this little guy more and more often. I’m a slow-sipper so I can finish my brew w/out my coffee getting cold from this one. He comes in a set of china my mom got for me when I was a teenager, telling me one day I’d be thankful for her purchase. And, of course, mom’s right.

Okay, it’s 10pm and I’m still drinking (caffeinated) coffee. But if I have important learning to undertake gosh darnit, and I am trying to uncover all the flavors hidden in my little mug ‘o joe.

So, as I’ve mentioned, I’m working on the Panamanian beans.  I had a cup this morning and took some notes as I sipped.  Here’s what I wrote:

“hot,”  ”a little bitter aftertaste”, “drinkable”, “black”, “balanced”, “no milk-sugar”…  Yes, the height of eloquence here!

I brewed another cup this evening and decided it was time to make a forray into the vast cyber coffee world to do a little research on how to taste this coffee in my hand.   I started w/ my trusty wikipedia.  Then moved onto cooler sounding blog names like:  www.ineedcoffee.com and  www.passionforcoffee.com

Here’s the info that stood out to me:

• I should probably re-evaluate my affinity for french roast.  It’s one of the darker roasts and, while it has a strong flavor, many of the flavor nuances are burned off in the longer roasting process.  So, I wouldn’t be able to pick up that one kind of bean tasted floral and another citrusy, for example.  Not that I can now, but anyway, thinking optimistically.
• True coffee snobbery means doing a coffee “cupping”.  Basically a coffee tasting in which you pour boiling water over coffee grounds, wait a couple of minutes, push the floating grounds apart w/ a spoon.  Take a big ole whiff of the brew.  Dip your spoon back in it and slurp it all around your mouth. Not at that stage quite yet.  Still opting for old fashioned “make it in a coffee maker” way.
• Coffee has 800 flavor characteristics (while wine has just 400).  Interesante.

So, I lied.  Yesterday, I didn’t even brew my daggum coffee.  It was kind of go go go all day, and by the time I it was done I just plopped on the couch and fell asleep in front of America’s Next Top model.

So today is actually the day.  I’ve brewed my Panamanian coffee and it awaits me in my coffee maker this very moment and I’m confronted with the realization that I actually have to learn how to taste.  What am I looking for in a coffee?  What flavors/taste sensations?  How do I describe it?  “Delicious?”  “Strong?”  “Rich?”  I have to learn some of the coffee snob jargon I suppose.  Maybe Sweet Maria’s (blogroll right) would be a good place to start.  Let me sit down w/ my cup of coffee and do some research.

Also have to clean up/organize this blog a little bit.  That will be my weekend task…

Today is the day I start “the experiment”.  Learning to find the nuances in different coffees.  I’ve got two types to try:  Good Company’s Columbian beans and their Panamanian beans.  They are both french roast.  Now that I’m starting this experiment, I’m having doubts.  It used to be a simple cup of coffee I was taking pleasure in.  No analysis.  No worries.  Just relaxation and goodness.  Am I going to ruin my simple pleasure by becoming to picky and critical? 

Anyway, I’m far from a scientific type, just gonna post my observations if I can have enough discipline to do that.  It might have to be in the evening though, ’cause I just can’t sit down to write in the morning (when I’m actually drinking the stuff).

Okay, off to brew before baby wakes up.  First up…Panamanian.

First off, I really don’t have time to be keeping another blog.  I can barely add pictures to my family blog.  So, I’ll let you know right now that any writing you see up here will be grammatically incorrect, unedited crap.  I have no time for polish.  I just wanna document my forray into the world of coffee snobbery.  I love coffee.  I need it.  I drink it.  I treasure my cup ‘o joe.  I know when I like it and when I don’t, but that’s about the limit of my knowledge.  But now it’s time to take the next step!  Inspired by my trips to Hiro’s Coffee Farm and Good Company coffee roasters, I’ve decided to start educating my palate on things coffee.  To keep me disciplined in my self-education, I’ll document my experiments in tasting here. 

The experiment:

First, I want to learn how to taste.  When I go to Starbucks they’re always telling me where the coffee is from. Oh it’s the Ethiopian blend, or Kenyan, or something like that.  I’m like, okay, whatever, just hand it over.  But now I want to know the difference.  The difference in beans and the difference in roast.  So I’m gonna start slowly, tasting coffee my own way.  First, brewing the coffee at home and comparing the taste of the different beans, then moving on and comparing the different roasts.

I will buy my coffee at Good Company, the local coffee roaster here on Okinawa.  They don’t speak English there, so I have to rely on myself for working out the nuances of different flavors.  Of course, if anyone actually reads this feel free to add your two cents as well.

So, with that…we’re off!