Sometimes A Cup of Coffee Is Just a Cup of Coffee

The pace of my life continues to accelerate as I hurtle towards graduation (yikes!). I am still loving restaurant plating, especially this week when we were doing desserts for staff and other students, so things were slightly less stressful than when we did it for the VIP event. Of course, at the same time, my days are filling up with meetings about the next six weeks and other training.



Friday, for example, in the afternoon we had the second day of coffee training to prepare us for working front of house at the bakery and cafe in December. Day one was the origin of coffee and how it's processed, but today we did a "cupping" ("is that like spooning?" Legolas asked yesterday).

A cupping is essentially like a wine tasting, where you evaluate first the fresh-ground beans and then coffee made from them for fragrance, aroma, flavor, body, "brightness" (the acidity) and aftertaste.



We cupped four different coffees without knowing anything about their origin. It was interesting. To a point. The woman explaining it all couldn't help but be pretentious. She was nice enough, but I'm sorry, when you put your nose in fresh-ground coffee and say "I'm getting nectarine" I just don't buy it... Of course, on my tasting sheet I wrote down such impressions as "wet leaves," "musty hotel room," "wet asphalt" and "caramel." I scored big points with her for saying I got a "passion fruit-like" brightness from one bean, which I did, but really... you could stare at paint chips all day and find as many descriptors for essentially red or green color, you know?

So, yes, I don't have a great nose, but I could detect which coffees were floral and which had more body and more or less acidity, but just like with wine, I lose patience with the details. The woman was hinting that she simply didn't have time to discuss how to pair coffees with desserts in a mere three hours because it was so complicated, but she also said "think about how people will drink their coffee" when we were designing a "coffee list." (Yes, having made wine and more recently chocolate annoyingly complicated, the people who make their living off the more pretentious tendencies of foodies are now trying to make coffee just as exalted and complex... Fair Trade my ass, these people are motivated by the money they make off convincing people that serving anything other than a particular single-origin blend roasted by their particular process would be like asking guests to drink from the dog's water bowl.)

Anyway, enough ranting. I took her advice. I thought about how people do drink coffee. Yes, I can see how it's important to think, in general, about, say, acidity of a particular coffee compared with the acidity (or lack thereof) in a particular dessert, just as I wouldn't go serving a Riesling with spaghetti bolognese. But when it comes down to it, here's how every person I know drinks their coffee: either in a morning-induced stupor as fuel, or relaxing during a meal with others, while socializing and talking about things other than the "brightness" of their coffee (most people I know also sweeten and/or add milk to their coffee).

I don't know anyone who drinks their coffee by sticking their nose in the glass, then loudly slurping a half-teaspoon of it and announcing "I'm getting fresh hay and coriander."

I mean, honestly.