Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/123507
ROASTERS REALM by Joel Pollock photos by Christian Mejia Tracking taste from coast to coast ALTERED STATE: Panther Coffee creates two distinct espresso blends: one influenced by East Coast taste preferences and another favoring West Coast palates. I n January, my roasting company, Panther Coffee, had the good fortune of winning a Good Food Award. Though 13 of this year's 18 GFA-winning coffees hailed from Ethiopia or Kenya, ours came from Colombia—from Finca El Ventilador in the Huila region, to be exact. Grown by Jose Edgar Pareja, this coffee was unique for its origin, with flavor notes including tangerine and Concord grape. After winning the award and reflecting on the results, I realized that while our Colombian was unusually acidic and perfumy for a coffee from that region, it also had a classic caramel, toffee base from which those other attributes seemed to spring. Others and myself loved it, and part of its beauty was held in the flavor components that had nothing to do with acidity. Before long, I started thinking about a conversation I had on the second-floor porch of a hotel in Jinotega, Nicaragua, with coffee producer Francisco Javier Valle Garcia and Din Johnson from Ristretto Roasters in Portland. During that talk, Garcia told us: "Not everyone is looking for acidity." I've found this to be true, and it's an important point for all of us roasters to keep in mind as we try to serve the ranging tastes of customers. When we opened our business in Miami three years ago, we noticed right away that the palates and flavor preferences of our clients were very different than those of customers in our previous home of Portland. We brought our coffee to many events around Miami during the infancy of Panther Coffee, and we would serve two coffees side by side. One would be a sparkling Kenya with screaming acidity, featuring notes of blackcurrant and grapefruit. The other would be a solid 85-point Brazil with sugarcane, 54 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com honey and hints of a citrus flower acidity. Invariably our tasters in Florida would choose the Brazilian coffee: Sweetness and balance seemed to be the unanimous preference. When we created our initial coffee lineup at Panther, I was very adamant about having only one espresso blend, which we would also use for cold brew. The blend had a solid chocolate and caramel foundation, and it was very creamy with a ripe red fruit note for the finish. But, more recently, I've also been thinking a lot about what Garcia said in Nicaragua: "Not everyone is looking for acidity." I've been lucky enough to sit on the scoring panel at Cup of Excellence events, and on numerous occasions I've witnessed the following: After scoring in silence, we would be asked to raise our hands to show the scores we gave to an individual coffee. Cuppers from a certain country would often agree unanimously on several coffees without ever having discussed them. The unspoken calibration was amazing. The exception to this seemed to be the Americans— we would often stand divided. The pattern I noticed ran across geographical lines, with the West Coasters having a strong preference for acidity and the East Coast reps leaning more toward overall balance. With this fact in mind, I returned to our espresso blend. I took the flavors in our espresso and rearranged them into two blends. I moved the coffees providing juicy, super-acidic notes (washed coffees from South and Central America and Africa) to one side for the West Coast Espresso. Then I moved the coffees from Brazil and other origins that were marked by soft sweetness to the other side—using a careful combination of naturals and pulped