Notes From a Durham Coffee Tasting

Brian: The idea of connoisseurship is funny to me, because even as an “insider” of this practice (I write music criticism), it’s often still absurd and full of unnecessary self-seriousness.

Rachna and I went to the headquarters of Counter Culture coffee, a Durham-based roaster that is thoroughly 2011 in its non-corporate, community ethos.... Still, it’s hard to call a company gimmicky when it makes something this good. You’ve tried it before, at Francesca’s on Ninth Street or the Coffeehouse on East Campus—I’m the manager there, so I’m an expert... trust me.

Rachna: I am a functional coffee drinker.

Brian woke me up to drive him to the headquarters of Counter Culture Coffee, in Research Triangle Park where pharmaceutical factories are tucked in forests at the ends of long, winding driveways.

On Friday mornings at 10 a.m. they host a free coffee tasting (they call it “cupping”) and tour of their factory, which serves as excellent PR and is the kind of experience that could be sold as an expensive date package to vacationing couples in Hawaii.

I would never go there on a date. We arrived late. Joe, who had a light mustache with a wide space between the left and right parts of the mustache, was well into a lecture on how to taste. “People are designed to taste things very well,” he said. /p>

After tasting three different varieties of coffee, we filled out rubrics with designated qualitative categories pertaining to smell (fragrance, aroma, break), taste (brightness, flavor, aftertaste) and feel (body). Since I missed most of the smell portion of tasting, I can’t really tell you the difference between fragrance or aroma, though general consensus seems to be that the former is more specific, less ambient and immersive than the latter, and I can’t really accurately describe “break” either. For obvious reasons, “coffee break” is hard to Google for this purpose. “Brightness” is a synonym for acidity. Body refers to texture.

“Oily. Oily, not in a bad way, but as a tactile feel,” said a man holding a straw hat under his elbow. He could have been describing the texture of his own voice.

Attendants were encouraged to throw out florid descriptors, the more off-the-wall the better, like “Grandma’s attic” or “softball field.”

“That’s a good one!”

My sole contribution was to compare my favorite of the three varieties to bergamot, only because it was an ingredient in a shampoo I’d just bought. Turns out I was dead on. Bergamot is a perfect connoisseur word—way better than a simple “orange” comparison would be.

Joe nods his head in reassuring approval at literally everything anyone says.

Joe instructed everyone to “Slurp as vigorously as possible” from the sample cups.

“I’m afraid I’m making a sound,” a tall Asian man told Joe.

“But in Japan it’s polite,” he responded.

People were emboldened by consensus that validated their taste, though some remained more tentative than others in their judgment.

The crowd was mostly retirement age, or maybe military men on leave, the sandals with socks variety of unself-consciousness that you are treated to after the top of the hill.

A woman in flowered shorts and her husband, in a checkered polo with golf tees on it. (At first I wasn’t sure if they were golf tees or small animals, like lobsters or some other New England invertebrate he likes to eat.)

One of the more vocal participants was blind, and I imagined that everyone was pondering the same thought as me, whether being blind really heightens your other senses. I wished I’d asked him.

At the end, Joe asked about favorites.

“I was thinking the first one because it hit me so nice,” someone said of the Ecuadorian variety.

The man in the golf tee polo preferred the Ethiopian: “I thought it had the strongest aftertaste. But when it was gone it was gone.”

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