Language of coffee

If French is the language of love, then Spanish must be the language of coffee. I know this because a woman from Lima was recently in town advising the coffee-production efforts north of Kigoma. I had a chance to meet with her and a couple of her colleagues as they rated the coffees in the region, and they showed me how it's done.

Two of the people in the room were professional “cuppers,” trained in the art of evaluating coffee, similar to sommeliers in the world of wine. They take a spoon of coffee and slurp it loudly and quickly, letting the taste fill every corner of their mouth. They then swirl the coffee around for a few seconds and spit it into a bucket. Then a spoonful from the next cup, and on and on.

It is a rather loud and somewhat disturbing process, with so much slurping and spitting happening you almost forget this is how million-dollar cash-crops get started.

There are different criteria that are used to rate coffee. On the day I was observed the cuppers, they were ranking coffees based on five measures: aroma, body, flavor, acidity and aftertaste. It was incredible to watch three people in the room taste and rank coffees, and compare notes that were miraculously synchronized with each other. "Cup four of coffee eleven had a light essence of cassava to me..." "I said that, too!" were the types of comments you heard as they compared notes. They turned to me, "What did you think of the blend?" I searched for flavors of chocolate or honey or fruit - since they seemed to find fruit flavors in so many of the coffees on the table - but all I could come up with was "it tastes hot."

This is what I learned: first coffee cherries are picked, then the seeds are shucked from their fruit and washed and fermented – the latter step taking somewhere between 18 hours and three days, which I believe helps to finish removing the pulp from the seed. The seeds are then dried and tumbled to remove the outer-shell of the coffee seed, called “parchment.” Seeds are then hand-sorted to ensure no parchment makes it into the roaster, and they are sifted through screens which allow small or fragmented seeds to fall through (apparently they have poorer flavors). What is left is roasted, packaged and shipped to coffee drinkers from Bubango to Bellingham. All that just for a cup of coffee.

The woman from Lima spoke so beautifully about coffee I almost forgot she was speaking in English. Between the "chocolate aromas" and the "essences of honey," I wondered how I had ever ruined a cup of coffee with caramel syrup before. And while it's not yet a language I totally understand, I am willing to take the time to figure it out.