Our Palates are Spoiled!

In the roastery I work at, there’s an abundance of coffees we have/want to taste. Either it’s for keeping the roasting consistent, choosing samples for shipment, identifying the monthly offering, and quite a few from guests who want to share the coffee they receive with us.

Needless to say, we focus on producing good coffee, and learning from it. All the floral, fruity, savory, sweet, complex, citrusy, lively, spice & the whole percentage of “chocolatey” is what we usually try to figure out in a cup. These attributes are basically half of SCA flavor wheel.

Now I ask, what about the other half of it, where does the chemical, musty, wood, vegetative or sour come from? These are attributes that are deemed to be unpleasant. I would never voluntarily spend my money on this kind of coffee, but if an opportunity comes up, heck yea, let me cup that old shack-papery-flat-woody scented/flavored coffee!!

Boy let me tell you, that my excitement raised eyebrows when I just decided to cup commodity coffee that was a feet away from being inside the garbage. It felt like I was doing a very bad thing, which would be funny in a third person perspective!

I just had my reasons. I just had to. My conscience told me so. My idea is that I wanted to put myself back in recalibrating my ideas of “good” & “pleasant”. I drink so much of specialty coffee, that standards are raised. That is a great thing on one end but also, I cannot forget that there’s the other side of the industry that doesn’t bother to be in par with the quality of specialty coffee. How will I appreciate the “good”, if I lose my exposure to “bad”.

I’m glad I did that. On top of this realization, I wonder how grades in Cup of Excellence all over the world will turn out, if we have all attributes of bad commodity coffee in one cupping bowl, designed to be in the center. It’s a wild idea but I wonder. Damn, our palates have been spoiled. Recalibrate.