Seattle Coffee Works

The second most common question in our café, next to “do your roast your own beans,” is “how should I store my coffee?”

“What’s the best way to keep coffee fresh? Can I store it in my freezer?”

Gulp.

A tough question that requires some scientific research.

First, let’s tackle what we know about freshly roasted coffee. We know coffee gives off CO2 for a few days after it’s roasted. We know that coffee left in open oxygen deteriorates more quickly than coffee protected from air.

In our café we store coffee in bags with one-way valves to let gas out and keep oxygen from getting in.

We also know our bags aren’t great for the environment, but compostable bags with one-way valves have yet to hit the market, so we stick with the bags with the best storage quality. Since this month is Earth month, we took another look at packaging. How much does that one-way valve really affect the lifespan of a cup of coffee?

Turns out, it affects coffee in a big way.

Last month we roasted our Colombia Huila Monserrate (March 30) and packaged it in six different ways. Each week after the roast, we blindly tasted each coffee, diligently trying to discern the palatable differences between them.

Over three weeks the coffee aged and each Monday we tested the six differently packaged coffees for new flavors during the aging process. Here’s what we found:

–The multi-ply bag with one-way valve scored high marks of freshness evenly throughout the three weeks. The coffee retained chocolate and sweet notes and some liveliness in its body.

The Kraft bag with no valve scored high the first week but deteriorated rapidly in the second and third weeks, developing a chalky mouthfeel and some grassy notes.

The silver tin with valve scored similarly to the bag with valve, particularly in the second week. The coffee showed a beautiful balance of caramel and nuts.

The silver tin without the valve scored a C average with decent chocolate and earth notes but became flat as it aged.

The espresso hopper showed more promise in the first week but the coffee in weeks two and three became thick and developed a toasted or char-like characteristic.

The heat-sealed multi-ply bag with valve, opened in the third week, showed the most complexity compared to the other coffees in week 3. Milk-chocolate base, earth and cinnamon.

So what did we learn? The valve seems to help the most in the final weeks of the coffee’s life.

In short:

–Keeping coffee longer than two weeks? Have it heat-sealed in a bag with a valve to make sure it retains its springy-ness in the cup.

–Drinking it sooner rather than later? Either the bag with valve OR a silver tin with valve will keep the coffee fresh and ready for enjoying. As long as it can let the gasses out and keep oxygen from getting in, the coffee should last a few weeks and keep the palate happy.

Six ways to package coffee side by side

Josh (my friend and coworker) recently told me that we shouldn’t ever have wasted espresso when we use the Anfim grinder, since it times each dose to the 1/100th of a second.

I asked him why. I have to know why I’m doing something before I do it, or in this case don’t do it. Also, I think I have a problem listening to authority figures. So when Josh told me how I was to use the grinder I’ve been using for some time, I instinctively bristled. I didn’t understand why he was stifling my creativity (what if the moment called for huge overdosing?). And he didn’t understand my resistance.

After some thought, I realized he was right. This time. We talked and hugged (something we do a lot at SCW). What I wasn’t prepared to appreciate in that moment was that he was actually helping and not stifling my creative process by trying to eliminate the variable of inconsistent dosing. He was trying to help me and every SCW barista control the outcome when we pull a shot of espresso. I realized right then that creativity and control aren’t enemies, they’re partners.

This may seem obvious to some of you. To me, it was an epiphany. Creativity provides the raw material to be controlled, and control keeps creativity from tripping over its own feet so it can achieve better results.

Another great example of this dynamic in action arrived a few days ago. The Trifecta coffee machine provides precision control of 11 variables in each cup of coffee. Overly mechanized? Maybe. Artisan? Definitely not. But we’ve been making consistently very good (by our standards) cups of coffee in it so far, and we’re still fine-tuning the variables. Soon, I believe that we’ll be able to make consistently superb cups of coffee, given enough time to learn what each variable does and how they all interact. I believe this because the variables are under constant computer control. Without that control, the ground would always be shifting under our feet a little bit.

To be sure, I wouldn’t trust an automated espresso machine to make my latte. Espresso is too fussy and I think it needs a human brain and heart to work with it and make it taste great. And in general, an excess of standardization without innovation is stifling and boring (see Sebastian’s latest post). But in my experience, pure, uncontrolled creativity often falls short of its potential. I wouldn’t have thought to nix the espresso waste from the Anfim. But now that I’ve adopted Josh’s policy, I know just how much espresso is in each dose, and my results have been a little better. I’m that much closer to serving you absolutely amazing espresso every time.

In the current New Yorker (April 5, 2010), Adam Gopnik writes about the Le Fooding phenomenon in France (Annals of Gastronomy: No Rules! The new French school of food.)

Le Fooding is meant to be a composite of Food and Feeling. Fooding-istas define themselves as folks who reject the old French school of rules; break down the distance between chefs and diners; make space for true experimentation and innovation.  Traditional French cuisine is a highly evolved yet mechanical application of skill. Chefs admired by Le Fooding fans are just as skilled but more importantly they cook with their hearts and souls. If traditional French cuisine is a highly evolved science Le Fooding leans toward art.

The article reminded me of a recent conversation in our cafe about the different French bakeries in town. A friend of the house who’s attending culinary school loves a couple of the popular bakeries – one in West Seattle the other in Ballard. I share his admiration for their skill. And, believe me, I am a sucker for one of their extra-buttery croissants. There is another bakery in town, run by a couple of Japanese descent, whose line-up includes both the traditional French pastries and more unique explorations like green-tea muffins with red beans. This bakery showcases great skill and creativity in their assortment.

I’d like to say that here at Seattle Coffee Works we’re more on the Le Fooding side of our trade. At a recent cupping, one fellow cupper remarked how free-flowing our cupping was compared to another roaster’s more traditional cupping. At that roaster there was a whole protocol around cupping; the cuppers’ experience is structured around using different sense and discovering coffees along variables such as aroma, flavor, body, acidity.

Our philosophy is that you should cup and see what happens. By and large you know a coffee is good when the adjectives describing the coffee just keep popping into your head. The good coffee doesn’t let you stop talking about it. The bland coffee will be forgotten within minutes. I know that sounds banal. Yet that’s simply back to the basics. Just like Le Fooding, we don’t need a church of food, the bible of coffee to tell us how to feel about our coffee. We should be able to experience the coffee on our own terms, informed by convention only in as much as convention is helpful in sorting out our feelings.

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/

Still buzzing from the caffeine and the high of such a beautiful array of coffees–the first unofficial cupping of 2010 was a success! With a variety of Indonesian coffees and a few excellent Peruvians, a small group gathered in the roastery to schlurp and sip our way through 13 coffees from seven countries and two growing regions.

Highlights?

Bali. 

The Bali Organic Kintamani Natural definitely stole the show. The roasted beans looked like the color of light milk chocolate and showed such outstanding fruitiness. The Bali began with notes of deep, wild berry and that blossomed into a natural pungent sweetness. An instant hit.

Schlurp. “Woah!”

Schlurp. “Holy cow!”

Schlurp. “Wow! It’s SO sweet!”

The Balinese coffee definitely presented the most interesting fruit-forward profile and didn’t digress into an acidic tang after it cooled a little.

Of the three Sumatras, the Mandheling DP “Rona Bkahti”  pleased quite a few palates with rich malty body, notes of maple and sweet tobacco. Just complex enough and not aggressively earthy.

The Flores Organic Bajawa A/WP-1 gave us a velvet mouthfeel with light floral notes and a hint of melon and citrus.

The two from Papua New Guinea offered deep floral and herbal tones.

The FTO Peru Cepicafe offered the most complexity of the three Peruvians. Enough high notes with some light peppery spice, but not so much as to overpower the smooth, earthy body.

What a treat to sample a variety of under-explored Asia-Pacific coffees that offer more than the usual lineup of smoky, dark and rich flavors.

More coffee cuppings coming soon, so keep your palates ready for more schlurping!

Photo Credit: http://media.news.com.au/travel/lp/images/BN2140_2.jpg

Katie and I will be at the Burke Museum this Saturday 11-2 for a sampling of three of our favorite origins.

Come on by if you have time.

The wonderful folks at the Museum even made a flier to announce the occasion. 

I hope no one is surprised to read that we think that our coffee is the finest there is. We’re constantly cupping new green coffees and trying out new blends; we’re also continuing to tweak our roast profiles to bring out the best in each of the coffees. If you disagree let’s at least state that we’re trying REALLY hard.

But does it matter?

We’ve long found that our ability to sell a coffee has a lot to do with what the label says. For instance, our variation of the Mocha Java, the Obama Blend, has been one of our best-sellers ever since we introduced it last November; when we renamed our Atlantic Blend into Seattle Sunrise, we immediately saw a significant up tick in sales of the very same coffee. 

The big packaged-good companies know the drill much better than we do: a can of cola consists mostly of very expensive aluminum packaging filled with water and sugar and trace amounts of flavor, color and caffeine. Most shelves in a regular supermarket are full of this kind of stuff: it’s all about the art of selling an inferior product with the help of expensive and good-looking packaging. Wall Street types, immune to immoralities such as endangering half the nation with obesity, have made great money with this deceptive practice. It also comes as no surprise that our corporate competition in the coffee business, the one with the green logo, has a number of consumer-good veterans on its board.

Even though we’ve smelled the success potential of good packaging, we’ve concentrated most of our efforts on the stuff that’s inside the bag. Turns out, there is a chance we might be working in vain. In an experiment at MIT, participants were asked to describe the smell of rose pedals concealed in two separate paper bags. One bag had a positive label on it, along the lines of “deliciously fragrant roses;” the other said something about lawn clippings. To everyone involved the first bag smelled much better than the second. What gives?

Is possibly Katie’s artful description the real reason why we have a hard time keeping our delicious Sulawesi Toraja in stock?

Photo Credit: Shabby Chic 

Cupping events are one of the many highlights of working in our café. There’s so much suspense and anticipation in our search for new single origins. There’s a primal excitement as everyone gathers around the tall glasses, preparing their lips for some serious schlurping work. There’s the crumbly coffee crust and the first inhale of the aroma as you scoop sopping coarse grounds from the cup. There’s the auditory satisfaction of the brisk schlurp as cuppers suck the murky brew from the wide spoons. And of course there’s the orchestra of flavors—sweet citrus, floral and herbal, soft and smoky—revealing themselves after each spoonful.

This week we sampled through four Indonesian coffees and three Central and South American single origins. The organic Java estate offered rich smokiness, similar to our lushly bold Sumatra. The Fair Trade, organic Papua New Guinea estate brought a bit of light citrus notes to the sample. An organic Flores Bajawa offered floral and herbal notes amid a light body and the organic RFA certified Sulawesi revealed the biggest range of complexity, with deep, rich bass notes with smooth berry fruitiness.
The Central and South American coffees ranged from pungently sweet to richly smooth. The organic Costa Rica La Amistad danced with bright and sweetly citrus flavors, hinting at a splash of berries. The Fair Trade organic Bolivia Caranavi offered only a lightly sweet earthiness. And lastly the Fair Trade organic Peru Cepicafe delivered a smooth body balancing earthy notes with gentle lemony and berry sweetness.
Each of the coffees we sampled were beautiful in their own right, from heavy in body to citrusy sweet high notes. While we would love to offer the entire gamut, we chose a small handful to complement our growing menu of single origins. You’ll see these new coffees on our online store and in the café very soon. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with suspense and anticipation of the new coffees to come!