@nickcho

Of the many things about coffee that Trish has opened my eyes to, the most valuable is embracing the full spectrum of coffee quality as the true human condition of the coffee world. During my college years, I spent a year abroad in Dhaka, Bangladesh, teaching music at a Christian missionary school. Despite the life-changing lessons I learned back then about what the world is really like, I was lulled into a very sheltered perspective on specialty coffee. Great coffee = good. Poor-quality coffee = bad.

The problem is that when you delve deeper, past the over-simplified memes, you’re forced to make a choice: Do you care more about coffee quality, or about people? Let’s set aside the barista/retail/consumer end of the chain for a moment, and focus on the producer-side. We claim to be supporting coffee producers, but it appears that what we really mean is that we support producers of the coffees that we really like the taste of. We go to events in the US to meet coffee producers and feel good about the experience, but what really happened is that we just met some of the most rich and prosperous coffee producers in the world.

The most celebrated coffee “farmers” and farms in specialty coffee are also among the most successful, with many if not most of those people being the sons (and in a very few cases daughters) of prosperous families. Upward-mobility is but a flying unicorn in these countries. A wonderful idea, but not reality.

I don’t mean to disparage or insult any of those successful coffee producers. Their coffees are indeed worthy of acclaim, and the heredity of those people shouldn’t take away from that. But if our affinity for those producers and those coffees defines our scope to only the tip-top best-of-the-best of what coffee has to offer, we are building a temple for worshipping the rich in a self-perpetuating cycle of aggrandizement and affluence.

What’s more deserving of celebration: Producers of 88-point coffees improving to 92’s, or those with 81’s improving to 85 scores? In real-world terms, that’s like comparing those making $500,000 per year bumping up to $750,000, versus someone making $20,000 now getting $30,000. Improvements are improvements, but in the US, the $500-750K bump helps 0.5% of the population, whereas the latter group represents about 20-40% of the population (depending on the data source and the way you look at it). There are no good figures in the case of coffee quality as a percentage of total production, but suffice it to say, it’s a much more severe disparity.

And what of the below-80 scoring coffees, those deemed below-specialty grade? As we glorify the top-tier quality producers and commemorate them by putting their photos on our company websites and Instagram feeds, do we believe that those who produce lesser coffees are somehow lesser human beings? When we cup these coffees and laugh and mockingly push them away and shut them out of our minds because to us, they’re not worth even thinking about, can we really claim to be working to help coffee producers?

The specialty coffee industry has, at least within our boutique segment, done a shitty job of actually helping coffee producers. If we used specialty-coffee logic to help women in Nepal better their lives, many of us would choose to gather together the most beautiful of them and hold a bikini contest for cash prizes. Then we’d walk away, patting each other on the back, feeling warm and fuzzy inside for “helping” those poor, impoverished people. Harsh? Maybe, but you get the point.

But it’s too easy to criticize. What of solutions? What should we be doing then? I don’t have all of the answers, but here’s what I have to offer right now:

As with most things like this, it starts with awareness. Consider the majority of coffee farmers and their families that we dismiss as below our standards, and remember that they are real people deserving of our consideration… perhaps even more deserving than their more well-to-do countrymen. This would hopefully inform the way we talk about our industry and our coffees, and maybe we’ll be a little less dismissive when describing how we differentiate ourselves out there.

“Awareness” also includes the current and future efforts of those within our industry family who are working with a focus on the poor farmers, like Fair Trade USA. Throwing Fair Trade under the bus as “not doing enough” ignores the great work that the program does accomplish, albeit more often with coffees that you might not choose to serve at your shop or sell from your roastery. They are doing great, great work. Just because their work isn’t perfect enough for you doesn’t mean dissing them makes you look cool.

The Coffee Quality Institute, in the midst of some significant changes due to new leadership, has always been focused on improving coffee quality and the people who produce it. The recent development of CQI’s R-Grader program has had a lot of coffee people scratching their heads, unsure of how robusta coffees fit in to our understanding of what’s good in and about coffee. But why must all of our industry’s efforts be about making great coffee even better? What about expanding markets and exploring desirable coffees from lower altitudes and geographies that simply can’t produce high-quality arabicas? Supporting CQI’s work is not only helping those who we don’t directly affect through our own purchasing and work, it’s working to develop a sustainable specialty coffee industry by helping to improve the quality of below-specialty grade coffees up to a level that we’d actually be proud to roast, brew, and serve.

We talk a lot about the unfortunate fact that baristas are generally the lowest paid people in the consuming-world side of the coffee chain. This is true, and something that the entire industry should work to change. But how is it that the lowest-paid individuals on this side of that chain are spending so much time celebrating only the highest-paid folks on the other end? Is that irony, or tragedy?

Just some thoughts on this overcast Sunday afternoon.

Disclaimer: I currently have had no official relationship with the US Barista Championship or the World Barista Championship. In the past, I have served as USBC Chairman and on both the WBC and SCAA Board of Directors, I’ve competed few times over the years, emceed here and there, and helped with some of the online broadcast production. What follows is my personal commentary alone. Take none of this as any official, approved, or sanctioned anything from anyone.

This past week, the barista competition fans and participants in the US were on Twitter, discussing the just-released 2013 US World Barista Championship rules and scoresheets. I was glad to see it.

EDIT: See the bottom of this blog post, but these are apparently the 2013 WBC Rules and scoresheets we’re looking at. Most of this post is still valid, except the conclusion. Carry on.

Let’s be completely clear here. The 2013  Rules are nothing short of an official divergence from the World Barista Championship Rules & Regulations and scoresheets. This is many years in the making, but I think it’s worth acknowledging what’s going on here, and celebrating the USBC Head Judge committee for their courage in the matter.

Over the past 12 years, the WBC has been the crown-jewel of the specialty coffee world. Aside from a few hard-working and devoted staff people, it’s completely volunteer driven. While this sounds great ‘on paper,’ it comes with some significant challenges, not the least of which is that the rules and judging tend to be plagued by a certain amount of group-think effects. It’s something I’ve observed since my first involvement with the organization back in 2005. 

Today, the WBC is better organized than ever, with a talented and hard-working staff, an engaged Board of Directors, and the best crop of committee volunteers the WBC has ever had. However, it’s very difficult to wrangle something like the WBC for anyone. There’s more to say about this, but let’s leave it at that.

For anyone who is intimately familiar with the WBC competition format, you know that the most significant scoring elements are the times-four multiplied elements: espresso taste balance and tactile balance, cappuccino taste balance, signature drink taste balance, and overall impression. The format and scoring clearly indicates that the most important thing is the taste of the drinks (overall impression score also includes an assessment of the taste scores). 

What it doesn’t do a very good job of is articulate what “taste balance” means.

This has been a foggy area of the judging since its inception. I don’t know who came up with the idea of “taste balance” as the name for the qualitative organoleptic evaluation of the beverages served, but I would suspect that it was the product of some discussion and ultimately a compromise of sorts. How about “taste quality?” Flavor? Deliciousness? Any one of those is brow-furling for sure. If one espresso is more delicious than another, who is the arbiter of that scale? How does this adequately account for diversity of roast degree, coffee processing styles, etc.? 

So we’ve been stuck with “taste balance” and “tactile balance.” These are both terms that require interpretation, which in turn means that the interpretation is potentially different depending on who’s doing the interpreting. Even with further elucidation like “harmonious balance of sweet, acidic, bitter,” or “a harmonious balance of rich sweet milk and espresso,” it still leaves a whopping 55% (if you include the overall impression score) of the total score to how the judge interprets the concept of “taste balance.” Don’t get me started on “tactile balance.”

This fogginess has been brought up within the WBC rules and judging management in the past. I’m not privy to more recent discussions, but when something has been so nebulous for so long within an institution as large and diverse as the WBC global community (which includes all of the national organizations, regionals, etc.), raising the issue reveals just how nebulous it is. So foggy and disparate that it’s perhaps too big a topic to handle.

The trend over the years within the WBC has been to move more and more in the direction of supporting the barista competitor. This has meant clarifying rules, eliminating or changing scoring elements that were arbitrary or redundant (like the shape of the cups), and a general culture of transparency and good faith within the judging and within the organization. At the risk of offending anyone in particular, I’ll share that this cultural shift has really been led by the efforts of the American, Australian, and New Zealander representatives. 

But the “taste balance” thing still persists.

In 2009, when I was USBC Chair, we took it upon ourselves to take things one step further and we developed a Rules & Regulations Supplemental document, which sought to further clarify or amend certain rules. One of those was a clarification about “taste balance.” The score would be determined by an average between the “taste balance” of the drink, and how accurately the barista’s taste description matched the taste of the beverage. With the rules as written and the way they were being implemented in competitions, it seemed the best way to go. Publishing this supplement to competitors and enthusiasts alike helped everyone be more on the same page, with everyone being subject to the rules as written. 

This approach was shared with the WBC judging leadership of that time. Suffice it to say, it was not well-received. It was clear that while there wasn’t direct opposition, the topic was simply too big to be able to address in such a clear-cut way. Too many judges from too many countries were unwilling to budge from their own interpretations of the rules.

Now in 2009, when the USBC rules supplement was developed, it was implemented as a “supplement” rather than actual edits to the WBC rules, in order to try to soften the impact of what amounts to a vote of no-confidence in the rules as they stand. This year, for the 2013 USBC, the powers-that-be within the USBC leadership have taken that extra step. No supplement this year, kids. No mere the-way-we-interpret-it-in-the-US. We have a distinct USBC Rules & Regulations and Sensory Scoresheets.

Take that WBC Rules & Regs!

I haven’t spoken to any of the folks within the USBC leadership about this, but I already know why they did it: for the barista competitors. In order to have a fair and open competition, you need as much transparency as possible. The more rules interpretation-ing that happens behind the scenes, the more disconnected the barista competitors are from what actually scores points. 

Again, there’s much more to say on the topic, but let me close with this: Congratulations and bravo, USBC leadership. The barista competitors here in the US owe you our gratitude, as you’ve stepped up to the challenge and chosen the difficult option of a bold move. Sure, it’s a small thing… it’s no life or death situation. But it’s in those small things that you see character and courage. 

Thanks.

EDIT: So, I’ve been informed that I’m a dummy. Apparently, these are the new 2013 WBC Rules & Regulations… just an advanced preview via the USBC. That said, it’s still a great achievement, and arguably the most significant change to the competition since its inception. It’s a continuation of an ongoing evolution of the WBC, and a welcome one to be sure. It is a little odd that these rules are being rolled out like this… it’s unprecedented, hence my erroneous assumptions… but regardless, it’s great that the WBC leadership is able to accomplish this (again) small but meaningful accomplishment.

Background: When grinding coffee, there’s a term that comes up every so often called “popcorning.” It’s the bouncing-around of beans and bits-o-beans that happens when you grind a pre-weighed portion of coffee, with the last portion having no beans on top of it to keep things feeding through as it does during the earlier grind time. The alternative would be to have a larger amount of coffee beans in the bean hopper, stopping the grinder at some point during grinding. The Esatto attachment and the “-W” variant of the Vario grinder, both from Baratza, as well as timed grinders of various brands, allow for this, which would theoretically result in a more consistent grind profile compared to the results from grinds that ended in “popcorning.”

There are many ways to analyze particles like coffee grinds to discover a grind profile (analysis of the various particle sizes and the quantity of each size): optical analysis, sieve separation, etc. One informal way to compare the amount of fines (the smallest coffee particles, appearing close to the size of dust or powder particles) between grind samples is to observe the flow of water through the coffee bed and out of the filter. The idea is that if one grind is different from another, the water will flow more slowly through the coffee bed that contains more fines. 

Hypothesis: A coffee bed brewed with coffee that showed “popcorning” will have a slower flow of water, compared to an identical brew with grinds that did not “popcorn.”

Materials: Clever Coffee L Drippers (2), Kalita #103 white coffeeshop paper filters, scales (2), 44.2g Wrecking Ball Sidama Shakiso (4 days from roast, two portions), water (65 ppm TDS, 205°F starting temperature), Baratza Virtuoso Preciso grinder with Esatto attachment, VST coffee refractometer, scales, timers, etc.

Procedure: 

1) Ground 22.1g of the coffee, utilizing the Esatto function to weigh the coffee as it grinds. There was at least 100g of coffee in the hopper as this was grinding, and a small (~3g) portion was purged and discarded before the sample was ground. The sample was re-weighed in ground form to confirm the 22.1g figure.

2) Emptied the grinder of grinds and beans from the grinder, weighed 22.2g of coffee and ground the sample, allowing it to “popcorn” at the end. Re-weighed the sample to confirm 22.1g.

3) Brewed each samples in Clever Coffee Dripper, simultaneously and using identical technique, over approximately 4 minutes. Began “drain” at 3.0 minutes.

4) Observed the flow during “draining,” as well as with a stopwatch.

5) Measured strength of each brew using coffee refractometer.

Results: I observed no discernible difference between the two brews, and both measured at 1.31% TDS brew strength. Each drained in exactly 50 seconds.

Conclusions: I was a little surprised. I expected at least a small difference between the two brews. Someday I’ll attempt this one more time with more coffee, but this informal and admittedly non-scientific experiment yielded no measurable difference. It was a fun idea, and I’m glad to have done it. I’ll be doing some more experiments like this once we have better tools.

Respectfully submitted,

Nick 

(reposted from my G+ post from January. some stuff I’ve seen out there recently inspired me to reiterate this point.)

The prior literature on coffee brewing tends to use mass units for coffee (grams or ounces), and volume for water (liters or fluid ounces, sometimes gallons or cups). Granted, you’ll see teaspoons or tablespoons used sometimes, but none of those are really trying to be scientific.

Lavoisier’s Law of the Conservation of Mass teaches us that mass is a constant. Volume depends on density. If density is a constant, then you can effectively treat volume as a constant in that particular case. In the case of coffee brewing, the density of water is not a constant. Water density decreases at higher temperatures. I have this particular web page bookmarked for when I need to calculate water density at a particular temperature.

So when you say “I’m brewing coffee with one liter of water,” if you want to be precise and/or want to use this data to do some coffee brewing math, you need to know what temperature that water is. At room temperature, let’s say 20°C (68°F), one liter is 998.2 grams per milliliter. At 93.3°C (200°F), it’s 963.1 grams. The density decreased, and a given mass of water will expand in volume as it’s heated. This is true, and undisputed.

This is a fact that Vince Fedele has pointed out to the world by integrating it into the ExtractMojo (and MojoToGo) software. Both pieces of software, therefore, uses mass for water instead of volume. If you plug in a volume measurement, it will use its own temperature-density calculator to convert it to mass, before it does its calculations. This a great thing!

So what’s the problem? The problem is, with new units, you have to adjust the chart.

Everyone is still using charts that all read 18-22% as the Gold Cup extraction yield zone. But the 18-22% zone was developed with calculations using volume, not mass, of water. Therefore if you change the units to mass of water, since there’s a density-based delta (empirical change), you have to adjust the results of any calculations accordingly.

If using volume as your water number, the extraction yield zone of desirable taste characteristics “by the book” was 18.0-22.0%. Using mass and 93.3°C (200°F), the new corresponding zone is 17.2 to 21.1%. The “sweet spot,” if you’re trying to nail the middle point of that zone, is 19.1% extraction.

Therefore, 19.1 is the new 20.0!

[edit August 17, 2012] So to summarize my point above is, the old method (and chart) used liters of hot water. The new method uses kilograms (or grams) of water, which is better. The problem is that you can’t just plug in a kilogram of water in the place where a liter once occupied, because one liter is only 0.963kg. Either adjust the chart, or adjust your math, but either way, people are using it WRONG!