Tasty measurements

Coffee is engrossing, and is of utter passion and interest to many people. What I feel separates coffee in respect to competition, and how we collate amongst each other about coffee, is that it's entirely subjective. While taste is foremost relevant, and the other somewhat distracting effects yielded along with coffee (like caffeine!), there must be some system in order to create comparison and measurement. To measure coffee solely by the experience through flavor and aroma is great and all, but it's just not enough. While measuring a brew's total dissolved solids has no assurance of taste or flavor, it does however provide consistency and a method of communication. Communication to understand and allow different outcomes and why they might take place, and also to reduce the guess work and be able to properly discuss and relay information with each other. Replacing something as intimate and personal as taste with numbers and measurement is not exactly what is happening, but instead is a method to refine and purify the ambiguity of why certain results are produced from specific variables and parameters. Although a cup of coffee’s tds turns out to be 1.32%, and is not a guarantee of a good cup - yet I might find out after brewing and testing multiple cups that I far more enjoy coffees brewed in the range of 1.30% rather then 1.40%, and this is useful information. 

Shows the brewing process cut into slices -
the times are displayed underneath. 

As humans, we seem to enjoy competing with one another. I can brew a cup and think mine tastes fantastic, and then Jose can brew another cup and think his tastes better. By creating standards we can actually compare each other's brew with more then just our subjective and opinion based taste buds. Whoever is actually better must be debatable, and is that really of importance anyhow? As arduous as it can be to admit, but there was definitely a time in my life where I did indeed dump an ounce of half & half into my coffee - my dark, over roasted, coffee. I thought I enjoyed it brewed dense and strong, and in fact I assuredly did enjoy it. I recall visiting the SWRBC when it came to Santa Cruz with Jose, and trying my first cup of what was considered properly treated and well extracted coffee. I thought it was drastically weak, and there was such an intensely present sour acidity. What I knew is that it tasted like nothing I had ever previously experienced, and although I didn't necessarily want to experience more - I did want to find out why this was the standard. It was quite distressing, trying to organize my conflicting thoughts of what the perfect cup of coffee was. Jose was actually the first person to present this to me, and it truly threw us for a loop. We couldn't determine what we enjoyed about coffee, nor what was evidently unpleasant. We tripped over this for months before we had realized that the fierce, bright acidity that was once virtually unbearable - was the thing we now craved and looked for in coffee. 
The bewildering part is whether this happened because coffee is truly better this way (and if that is even a fair notion to present as true), or because we changed our expectations of coffee, because of what other people considered superior, or some other possible third thing. I do know that I enjoy coffee brewed and roasted similar to SCAA standards, but what is difficult is the reason why I do. I feel a vast amount of the people that enjoy coffee prefer consistency and assurance in what they already know. It's as if there is a fear of purity, and that uniting a well known quality like sugar is an easy solution to disclose the unsettling thought of an uncharted, and unexplored area. Why not take an adventure, who knows, you might end up in a place that is lovely and enchanted. The hindrance on the other hand is, well, you might not like it. You might not like the new single origin from Kenya, but that shouldn’t mean to turn your back away from anything else new. 
Despite a possible side track - I think the measurement of coffee and espresso is of utmost value and utility. Although I'm not always 100% sure whether my coffee is over extracted, under extracted, or both over and under, but I can assuredly find out, and hint towards the causes and reasons why. 
  

Cuppy Questions

Cupping a coffee from Kenya

Cupping seems to exist as the standard for evaluating coffee, in which every coffee has an honest chance with least external interference possible. It also is generally used to set an expectation that one might experience in a coffee. The often impressive tasty notes written on a freshly purchased bag of coffee doesn't always converge paths with what you may experience at home, or perhaps even at the cafe in which you purchased it from. Cupping is attractive in many aspects: its parameters are easily kept stable between comparison of coffee, it gives you a heavy emphasis to determine aroma, and it also allows full potential without user mistake. Cupping provides a way that takes the absence of error out of most brewing methods, and it keeps the elements minimal so you can evaluate the coffee for what it is. My intrigue about cupping however, is why we use a method such as cupping to determine what people might find in a coffee, when in doubt the consumer isn’t going to cup the coffee and experience the same thing. Perhaps the consumer might actually cup the coffee, but cupping isn’t generally the way people prepare coffee to drink every morning. Maybe the fancy exotic words used to portray a coffee is for the sake of marketing, or maybe my taste buds are lacking, and I just can’t pick up the “fluffy, nougat, starfruit” notes as described on the bag. Without a doubt, I pick up some captivating flavors when trying new coffees, but very rarely would I agree on what the bag says. In a sense I feel like it’s a set up for disappointment, especially for the not as experienced coffee drinker. Someone more familiar on the other hand is more likely to average out the tasty notes along with the origin and the way it was processed for a better prediction of what’s inside. To see something like “loud, bright, tangerine,” tagged on a wet processed African coffee typically makes sense, and rides along with our intuition. But often enough I read things like “jaunty, cheer, buoyant” and just think to myself what a great day those people must have been having when they wrote this. With a thesaurus the limits are endless, and often come off as ridiculous. Indeed, sometimes I do find these strange adjectives riding along my pallet, but more often than not I’m in a whole other ball park.

What I do love about cupping, is not only the knowledge obtained from it, but the knowledge that gets shared during it. It’s really quite a social event, and while I’ve tried cupping alone, it is really quite unfortunate and dismal. After all, coffee is heavily communal and revolves around social interaction. And if more than two people can agree that a coffee tastes like brown sugar, then I suppose all the more reason to write it on the bag. Is cupping really that beneficial to helping the customer select a coffee? I don’t know, but it's definitely beneficial for education and analysis. This wasn’t supposed to question the cupping process, but instead dispute how we use the information we collect from it. I feel that you shouldn’t have to pull out a dictionary to comprehend a short summary of what you might experience in a coffee, but perchance that’s just me.