Thursday, April 05, 2007

Maddness. COE Maddness.

Well, after 4 hours and 30 coffees, there's no lie... I'm tired. This years Colombian COE's bring in some craziness. We cupped the coffees blind in two 15 coffee rounds. Ends up round one held mostly coffees from the back end of the jury's selection, while round two held the majority of the top 10. It was an awesome learning experience for me, as I have never cupped that many coffees at once, let alone all from the same country of origin.

Some of the stand outs to me were the first and second place finishers. Both being very nice. I actually scored the second place over the first place by two points, but don't get me wrong, Isaias Cantillo Osa's farm, La Esperanza produced a very fine coffee and I will be very interested in seeing how much it sells for. The second place finisher came from El Cedro, a farm owned by Leonte Collazos Rajas'. I found the aroma to being more pleasing in this coffee than Esperanza. Ironically, though, these coffees were the last two in our line-up, so my senses were numbing a bit.

One of the other notable coffees was actually the 30th placed finisher. What I liked about it most was the aroma. It smelled of fresh mozzarella, or a similar soft cheese. It was something I had never experienced before. I enjoyed that part of it.

The first round of 15 was harder to score. So many of the characteristics of them found to be common in the field. Lot's of acidity found all day long. Enough that I could have just had a few bowls of tomato soup and had the same kind of sensation after.

Monday, Cafe Imports will be cupping the top 10 scorers from today to determine which they are most interested in buying. I'm hoping to get enough roasting done early enough to join them once more. I should have more of an in-depth recap of the top 10.

1 comment:

Jassmond said...

Those are some beautiful coffees, I was glad to cup them out over the previous week. It sounds like we're going to have to fun stuff at the ST.