Seattle Coffee Works

For quite some time, we have wanted to know how to best package our freshly roasted coffee. Currently, we’re using multi-ply bags consisting of lots of petroleum derivatives and aluminum foil. Without actually having researched the matter, we have thought it better to have a one-way degassing valve in our bags. We pack all of our coffees within minutes of roasting. Unless we’re mailing the coffee we do not heat seal our bags.

Yesterday, we started a six-week test: we put our beloved Colombia Huila Monserrate in six different kinds of packaging:

1. Multi-ply plastic/aluminum bag with one-way degassing valve; rolled closed but not sealed;
2. Same as 1.; heat sealed;
3. Low barrier, bio-degradable paper / corn-based plastic liner bag; rolled closed but not sealed;
4. Tin with degassing valve;
5. Tin without degassing valve;
6. A Mazzer Mini standard bean hopper.

We’ll be doing regular blind tastings of 1. and 3. through 6. during our Monday 3pm conventional cuppings and our *new* Thursday 3pm vertical tastings. We’ll be taking notes on cup quality and anything we notice. We’ll throw Packaging 2. into the tasting mix only after three weeks so we can see what difference it makes when we heat seal our regular bags.

Feel free to join the tasting fun and weigh in with your opinion, or, just follow the experiment here on the blog. We’ll be appending our results to this blog post.

Update 1 - six days (cupping on April 5, 2010), Sebastian updating:
I only had a few moments at the cupping table this Monday. Katie had put coffee from five of the six packages on the cupping table. (No. 2, the heat sealed multi-ply bag, is remaining sealed until day 10 or so.) The tasting was blind, i.e. none of us cuppers knew which coffee was which. For, No. 1 (multi-ply, no sealed) won the tasting by a far shot: the coffee tasted brighter and was simply a lot more exciting than the other coffees. It seems, the other cuppers agreed. The experiment continues. Next tasting is on Thursday April 8, 2010 at Ryan’s Vertical Tasting.

Update 2 (cupping on April 12, 2010), Katie updating:

Nice cozy cupping with plenty of time to taste and chat. I mixed up the order of packages from last time to make sure any repeat tasters started with a clean palate. Coffees 3 (tin w/valve) and 4 (multi-ply bag w/valve) garnered the most positive comments–3 seemed the most balanced with enough body and strong, sweet caramel notes. Coffee 4 offered tangy notes with milk chocolate body. I also offered a control coffee: the same coffee, same roast date, packaged in our standard multi-ply bag w/valve for use in the cafe. I wanted to see if there were any strong differences in the experiment coffee and our Slow Bar coffee, since we continuously open and close the bags to brew single origin cups. Coffees 1 (tin w/o valve) and 2 (bag w/o valve) offered similar notes but were lacking the bounce and body of the others.

Thursday’s Vertical Tasting (@3pm) will feature Colombian again, with a few other coffees in various brewing methods. Join us next week and give us your own tasting notes!

It’s a great time to be a barista. I love transitions. I feel the most alive in them. And coffee culture, to my mind, is evolving right now. Even at premium coffee shops in Seattle, you can pay around $2 for a shot of espresso that will peel the enamel off your teeth, or you could pay $2 for a transcendent elixir that will make you fall in love with the world. I can’t think of another product with such a dramatic difference in quality. It’s a coffee jungle out there.

But lately, people seem to be demanding better. Why? I think it’s the tension between two factors. First, there’s better quality coffee to be had nowadays. Fresher coffee is being served, and you’re more likely to be told where your coffee comes from, and therefore what it really tastes like. “Kenya” or “Guatemala” tells you more than “Breakfast Blend” or “Dark Roast.” And you can order a Kenya coffee made in a variety of ways that will also affect the product, from French-pressed to vacuum pot to espresso.

Second, there’s the pre-existing condition, or the Starbucks effect. It’s easy to take shots at Starbucks when you make espresso at a micro-roaster. But I’m not into that at all. Starbucks as had an enormous impact here and around the world, and a look at coffee culture would be incomplete without considering it. What they do is standardize a product that’s better than terrible and make it so uniform that people always have their expectations filled. And that’s valuable to people. Up to a point.

What’s interesting to me now is that many people seem to have reached that point. We want more than predictability; we want flavor. We want to taste coffee, at long last, after 200 years of drinking it in this country. There are a myriad of flavors available in coffees grown in different countries, different regions, different family farms; all distinct. Also, each method for extracting coffee from beans brings out different characteristics. And each extraction method has a sweet spot where the best intensity and balance of flavors is achieved. This is what we geek out over at work. Sometimes, you get such a perfect coffee that it sends shivers down your body.

And everyone can experience that, not just coffee geeks. It’s a jungle right now. Even I don’t know what to expect half the time I order. But I do know that the more I listen to my palate and to the people serving me, the faster I will learn. I will continue to find new ways and reasons to love coffee.

Photo Credit: Claude@Munich: http://www.flickr.com/photos/c-s-n/79822340/