COFFEE
Coffee, coffee, coffee from the barista’s view
A few years ago, I started exploring and working in coffee, not unlike the sommelier do with wine. Around the bend of Istanbul layed an island — Burgazada — and the people I met were starting up their coffee roaster machine for the first time. Four Letter Word Coffee was a shrine to texture and aromas, it then became a temple of flavors. I got extremely lucky for they shared their knowledge and a space among their own path of discovery, experimentation and passion of the cherry fruit bean.
It starts here with this journal entry I wrote about Four Letter Word.
The sensory arrays a cup of coffee, depending on its origin, on its roasting, on its extraction is incredible.
For example, Kenyan coffees flirts with jasmine notes.
In the world of coffee we use a wheel and meet up with different beans to test our tasting buds. We slurp, we spit, we gather memories of past pastries. The beauty in the lesson coffee teaches you is: you are a student, you remain a student.
We will never know everything about coffee. Or anything else. Acceptance.
Life and other aspects of our path could be more beautiful if we remembered we’re all still learning. Everyday.
Play the game and interact differently with the flavors next time you go around the corner and have a cup?
(and feel free to send me your expedition’s results)
Coffee has been reborn through out the world in different waves. Ours is the third one apparently. In the last millenium, since its excavation from the cherry fruit in Yemen, the bean has crossed borders as an ambassador of cultures. Whether it’s healthy or not, the scientific studies have changed their mind quite often in the past years. Under fair trade, direct trade and the massive consumer market, coffee has been a tool and a delight.
A help to get up in the morning, or center one’s thoughts and energies, I want to emphasize on my love for the sensory experience.
This beverage of restlessness and urgency is a beautiful complex, savored in myriad of brewing methods, and serving methods.
From bright red to pale green to rich brown, the coffee bean is a marvel of intricacies. Sensitive, sensory, sensible to an accretion of factors, they all can affect the quality of the harvest in an instant. Responding to humidity, aridity, time and temperature, the bean through cultivating, harvesting, drying, transporting, roasting, extracting and finally drinking, it all is a game where everyone is a pawn to the laws of nature.
Coffee responds to different environment in different shades of flavors and aromas.
The ground, the air, the temperature and the sunlight differ according to the mountain’s sides, and all the factors enter in the coffee bean. The picking, and the harvesting will infuse the bean.
Like any immobile vegetal life, the tree’s evolution towards prosperity differed in sunlight and altitude. Aiming and striving to get pulpier, richer, a plant uses the different resources around to become more attractive to the dispersers (primates, mammals, birds).
All together, one’s cup is a long story of experimentation and masterization. From the plant’s evolution, to the drying method, to the roasting, to the hydrolysis (the reaction to the grounded coffee to water) : every step of the way enter in the equation of the cup you have in your hand.
There is more than one way to mess up a cup of coffee. And sadly, there’s more than one place that doesn’t serve great coffee.
When you hold one of the lucky success, enjoy every drop.
See an opportunity to enhance the senses through a flush of evolving aromas, a cacophony of flavors made clearer minute by minute, day-by-day while unfolding the possibilities of this acquired taste.
Approach the cup, discover the different aromas. The first sip is the strongest until you change your mouth taste with something else.
After the aromas, explore the juicy texture and the different flavors around the mouthfeel. Where did you discover acidity or sourness?
Finally, coffee evolve with temperatures. If you wait a while, sipping minute by minute the same cup, its evolution will be detectable, and poignant.
In Turkey, we have a strong culture centered around Turkish coffee. Around a table, people tell each other tales from their future while foreseeing one another’s destiny in the grounds. Have you ever tried it?
Coffee doesn’t only end on our tongues: its destiny can be extended to skincare:
Coffee grounds, used or not, can make for a spectacular caffeine scrub (mix it with olive oil).
Getting in the textures of life can start with coffee. Particles to touch, espressos to smell, brew to glide on one’s tongue, the brown-eyed girl could trample us into a new momentum.
Originally published as part of Copious Copy — A series of letters between the Earth and you: a weekly cosmos of words about metaphysics and enlightenment, through science and spirituality, consider joining the conversation.
