Coffee Tastings San Francisco Where You Actually Learn Something About What’s in Your Cup
My friend Isabel describes herself as someone who loves coffee without knowing anything about coffee and she has held this position for about fifteen years with complete comfort because loving something and understanding it technically have always felt to her like separate projects and she has never felt obligated to pursue both simultaneously.
She drinks good coffee when she can find it. She notices when coffee is bad. She has preferences she can articulate in general terms. Beyond that she has not particularly needed to go deeper and the not going deeper has worked fine for her.
Her coworker James changed this without intending to. James went to a coffee tasting at Barista Coffee and Brunch in San Francisco and came back talking about it in a way that Isabel found irritating in the specific way she finds things irritating when they sound more interesting than she’s willing to admit. He mentioned flavor notes she hadn’t considered. He talked about processing methods in a way that made coffee sound like it came from somewhere rather than just arriving in a cup from a machine. He said he understood his morning coffee differently after two hours at a tasting table and he wasn’t being pretentious about it which was the part that made it difficult to dismiss.
She went to the next tasting because she was curious and because saying she wasn’t curious would have required more energy than just going.
She came home two hours later and called her mother. She said mom I’ve been drinking coffee wrong for fifteen years. Her mother asked what that meant. Isabel said nothing bad just I didn’t know there was a right way and now I know slightly more about what right means and it changes how the whole thing tastes.
Her mother said that’s nice dear.
It was nice. Isabel has been to three more tastings since and she now describes herself as someone who loves coffee and knows slightly more about it than she used to and she holds this new position with the same comfort she held the old one.
What a Coffee Tasting Actually Is Because Most People Have Never Been to One and Don’t Know What to Expect
The phrase coffee tasting sounds like it might require credentials or prior knowledge or a level of palate sophistication that most people don’t have and aren’t sure how to acquire. This perception keeps a lot of people who would genuinely enjoy and benefit from a coffee tasting from going to one.
The reality is considerably more accessible than the perception suggests.
A coffee tasting, sometimes called a cupping in professional coffee contexts, is a structured way of tasting different coffees side by side in a format that’s designed to make the differences between them apparent and to give participants language and context for what they’re experiencing. The structure is what makes it different from just drinking coffee. The side by side comparison, the specific order of evaluation, the guidance from someone who knows what to look for and how to describe it, these things transform what would otherwise be a series of individual coffee experiences into something comparative and educational.
You don’t need to know anything about coffee to benefit from a tasting. You need to be willing to taste things carefully and to pay attention to what you’re experiencing and to apply words to sensations that might not have had words attached to them before. These are not specialized skills. They’re basic sensory attention that most people have and most people rarely apply systematically to coffee because nobody ever suggested they should.
Isabel walked in knowing nothing technical about coffee and walked out knowing things she hadn’t known before because the tasting was designed to be accessible to exactly that person. James walked in knowing a moderate amount about coffee and walked out knowing more because the tasting was also designed to be useful for exactly that person. Both of these outcomes from the same event are possible when the tasting is designed correctly.
Barista Coffee and Brunch designs their tastings correctly.
What You Actually Taste and How the Format Makes Differences Apparent
The specific coffees featured at any given tasting vary depending on what’s available and what’s interesting at that particular moment in the coffee calendar. But the format for experiencing them has consistent elements that make the tasting useful regardless of which specific coffees are on the table.
Multiple coffees tasted in sequence or simultaneously give your palate something the single cup experience can’t provide which is comparison. When you taste three coffees from three different origins one after another the differences between them become apparent in ways that tasting any one of them alone would never reveal. The Ethiopian that seemed bright and fruity when you tasted it first seems even more so after you’ve tasted the earthier Indonesian next to it. The Brazilian that seemed mild and chocolatey in isolation seems specifically nutty and smooth after you’ve had the more acidic Colombian alongside it.
This comparative experience is the core of what makes a tasting valuable for developing coffee palate. Your brain is very good at noticing differences when it has something to compare and very bad at noticing absolute characteristics in isolation. A coffee tasting gives your brain the comparisons it needs to do the work it’s good at.
The evaluation sequence matters too. At a professional cupping you smell the dry ground coffee before water is added to experience the aromatics at their most concentrated. You smell again after hot water is added and the aromatics change as volatile compounds are released. You taste after the crust that forms on the surface is broken and stir through. You evaluate sweetness, acidity, body, and aftertaste as separate aspects of the experience rather than as a single undifferentiated impression.
Isabel said the evaluation sequence was the most useful thing she took away from her first tasting. She said she had never broken coffee into components before and experiencing it as multiple distinct aspects rather than as a single flavor experience changed how she tasted coffee from that point forward including her morning cup at home which she said started tasting different because she started paying different attention to it.
The Vocabulary Because Language Changes What You’re Able to Notice
This sounds like it shouldn’t matter but it matters significantly. The vocabulary you have for describing sensory experience determines what your brain looks for when processing that experience. You can’t notice something you don’t have a concept for and concepts in sensory experience require words.
Most people have a limited coffee vocabulary before attending a tasting. Good, bad, strong, weak, bitter, smooth. These words cover the basic end of the spectrum but they leave a lot of sensory territory unnamed and therefore practically invisible to the person experiencing it.
The vocabulary of coffee flavor is more developed than most people know. Acidity in coffee doesn’t mean the kind of acidity you associate with heartburn. It means the brightness and liveliness that makes some coffees taste vivid and others taste flat. Differentiating acidity as a positive quality from bitterness as a negative one is a distinction that changes how you experience a huge range of coffees because you stop applying the same negative label to two different sensations.
Body refers to the physical sensation of weight and thickness in the mouth. A high body coffee feels like more is there. A low body coffee feels thinner and lighter. This distinction is immediately accessible as a sensation but many people have never had language for it and therefore have never specifically noticed it as a variable.
Flavor notes, the fruit and chocolate and floral descriptors that appear on specialty coffee bags and that seem pretentious to people who haven’t yet been told how to look for them, are real. They’re not invented by marketing people. They’re compounds present in the coffee that your palate is capable of detecting when your brain is looking for them. Knowing to look for blueberry in an Ethiopian natural processed coffee changes whether you detect it. Once detected it changes how you understand the coffee.
Isabel said the vocabulary was the thing that made the tasting feel like it opened a door rather than just being an interesting afternoon. She said the words gave her access to experiences she’d been having without knowing it and that having the access felt like a significant upgrade to something she’d been doing every day for fifteen years.
Origins and Why Where Coffee Comes From Changes What It Tastes Like
One of the most interesting things a coffee tasting at Barista Coffee and Brunch teaches people who didn’t know it before is that coffee is an agricultural product that tastes like where it was grown and how it was processed and that these two variables produce flavor differences as significant as the differences between wine regions.
Ethiopia is where coffee comes from originally and Ethiopian coffees have a genetic diversity and a range of flavor profiles that reflect this. The washed coffees from Yirgacheffe have floral and tea-like qualities. The natural processed coffees from Harrar can taste intensely fruity, sometimes specifically of blueberry or strawberry, in a way that surprises people experiencing it for the first time because the flavor is so far from what they expected coffee to taste like.
Colombian coffee from the Huila region has a brightness and a fruit sweetness that’s specific to the altitude and the soil of that growing area. Colombian coffee from a different region in the same country has different characteristics because the altitude is different and the soil is different and the microclimate is different.
Brazilian coffee grown at lower altitudes and processed using natural or pulped natural methods has a heavier body and more chocolate and nut notes than higher altitude coffees from East Africa. The altitude difference affects how the sugars develop in the coffee cherry and how the bean matures and the resulting flavor is a direct consequence of geography.
Understanding this makes coffee more interesting in a way that’s difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t had the experience. Isabel said after her first tasting she started reading the origin information on coffee bags in cafes and thinking about what the origin meant for what was in her cup and that this changed her relationship with coffee from something she consumed to something she thought about even briefly and that the thinking enriched the consuming.
Her mother asked how she knew all this now. Isabel said she went to a tasting. Her mother said she should go to one too. Isabel said yes you should.
Processing Methods Because They Change Everything and Most People Have Never Heard of Them
The processing method, the way the coffee cherry is handled after harvest to extract the seed which becomes the coffee bean, is one of the most significant flavor variables in coffee and one of the least discussed outside specialty coffee circles.
Washed processing removes all the fruit from the bean before it’s dried. The result is a clean bright cup where the characteristics of the bean itself come through clearly. You taste what the variety and the terroir produce without the influence of the fruit fermentation.
Natural processing dries the whole cherry with the fruit still on the bean for an extended period. The fruit ferments and the sugars and flavor compounds from the fruit absorb into the bean. The result is something that can taste dramatically fruity and sometimes almost wine-like. A natural processed Ethiopian can taste so specifically of fruit that people at tastings sometimes look up to confirm they’re still drinking coffee.
Honey processing sits between the two. Some fruit is removed before drying but a layer of the mucilage, the sticky fruit material, remains on the bean during drying. The result has some of the clean quality of washed processing and some of the fruit character of natural processing.
Tasting coffees processed in different ways side by side is one of the most immediately instructive things a coffee tasting can offer because the differences are large enough to be apparent to people who have never thought about processing before. James came back from his first tasting specifically excited about having understood processing for the first time. He said the natural processed coffee he tasted had changed his idea of what coffee could taste like.
Who Should Come and Why the Answer Is Basically Everyone Who Drinks Coffee
The coffee tasting at Barista Coffee and Brunch is not designed for coffee professionals or for people who already know a lot about coffee. It’s designed for people who drink coffee, which is most people, and who are curious about what they’re drinking and open to learning something that changes how they experience it.
You should come if you drink coffee every day and want to understand it better. You should come if you’ve ever noticed that some coffee tastes better than others and wanted to understand why. You should come if you’ve looked at a specialty coffee bag with flavor notes on it and been curious whether those notes are real or invented. You should come if you want to develop your palate in a way that extends beyond coffee to how you taste food generally because the skills transfer.
You should come if you’re the kind of person Isabel was before her first tasting, someone who loves something without knowing much about it and who might be surprised by how much knowing a little more adds to the loving.
A man named Robert who came to a tasting at Barista Coffee and Brunch as a birthday gift from his wife said he hadn’t expected to enjoy it as much as he did because he wasn’t a coffee enthusiast in any specialized sense. He said he left understanding things he’d had no framework for before and that the next morning his coffee tasted different because he was paying different attention to it and different attention produced a richer experience from the same cup.
His wife asked if he wanted to go to another one. He said yes immediately which from Robert she said was an unusual level of enthusiasm for anything that wasn’t football.
What You Take Home That Isn’t Coffee
The most valuable thing a coffee tasting gives you is not information about the specific coffees you tasted. It’s a framework for tasting coffee that you take with you to every subsequent cup you ever drink.
The vocabulary you develop at the tasting applies to your morning coffee at home. The understanding of origin and processing changes how you read bags and make purchasing decisions. The ability to differentiate acidity from bitterness, body from strength, flavor notes from generic impression, changes every coffee experience you have going forward.
Isabel said the best way she can describe what the tasting gave her is that it turned the volume up on something she’d been experiencing at low volume for fifteen years. The coffee didn’t change. Her capacity to perceive and appreciate what was in it changed and that capacity change is permanent.
She went from loving coffee without knowing anything about it to loving coffee and knowing slightly more about it. She said the slight more is the difference between listening to music and listening to music with some understanding of what the musicians are doing. The music is better because you’re more present with it.
That’s the coffee tasting at Barista Coffee and Brunch in a sentence. Go and come back more present with what’s in your cup. The cup will be better for it and you’ll have paid more attention to something you do every day and that daily attention compounds in a way that’s worth two hours on a weekend morning in San Francisco.
Isabel would tell you the same thing. She’d also tell you to go before you think you’re ready because she thought she wasn’t ready for fifteen years and it turned out she was ready the whole time.