Interesting coffee tasting.
Within the coffee roasting community there are sometimes opportunities to try something quite different. I’ve been roasting a lot of coffee for a fellow roaster Jim to help out whilst his head roaster was in hospital and long-term recovery. It’s been great fun and smugly satisfying when I’ve been drinking coffee around Nottingham knowing that I’ve roasted that. Anyway, Jim asked if I fancied a coffee tasting challenge, obviously I’m up for that. The context is Daterra, whose coffee we sell quite a lot of, has been experimenting on finding ways to enhance and improve the flavour by various fine tunings of production. A few years ago, I met the daughter of the Daterra family business at a coffee conference in London, and she was really excited about looking into different nuances regarding their coffee. They obviously monitor soil conditions, and weather conditions, relative to different cultivars, finding the best variety to suit those specific environments. She was also telling me that they were able to track every sack of coffee to an individual field, when it was harvested, how, who by, what they did with it. So, whether it was washed, natural, or honey processed, red or yellow cherry, how it was possibly fermented, every little segment of the process. And, finally what did it taste like. Well, they’ve now, (this is the fourth year of experimenting) started looking at how does different wavelengths of light have an effect on the beans when they are being fermented. Check this out.
Solar Spectrum Fermentation: Playing with Colour - DRWakefield - DRWakefield
So, Jim had two samples of identical coffee, same beans, Arara cultivar, grown in the same field, picked at the same time, roasted exactly the same, everything identical, except one bag were fermented under red light, the other bag fermented with no light, blacked out. My test was could I tell the difference. I do enjoy a challenge. First, we had Sebastian, prepare two cafetieres, with identical weights 20g of ‘Red’ beans in one and 20g of ‘Black’ beans in the other. The temperature was identical, 90oC, the duration of brewing identical, 4 minutes, and the quantities put in each cup identical. Obviously, Jim and I left the room whilst he did all of this. Each cafetiere produced 3 cups, so 6 in total. Jim had 2 cups of ‘Red’ and one of ‘Black’ or the other way around, it didn’t matter because I would have the opposite. The object of the tasting was to see if we could see if we were able to match 2 out of 3 samples. Obviously only Sebastian knew which of our cups A, B or C were which. We came back into the room; Sebastian had the identities of the coffees hidden. The test was on. We both started with the aroma. I thought that my cup B has a slightly different tang to it, sensing a slightly fruitier flavour than the other two cups. A small sip of each didn’t reveal any differences that I could discern. Back to sniffing, again I thought that possibly cup B was slightly different. Finally, a small mouthful of each, but it was only on swallowing cup B that I felt confident that it produced an apple flavour on the back of the throat. I recognised this from a Colombian anaerobically processed coffee we had in stock La Cabana. I didn’t know which cup was which but did know that cup B was different to cup A and C. Apparently, Jim was telling me before we started, that this Triangular Sensory Test was regularly done with tasting beer, the argument being that if you couldn’t tell the odd one out, your opinions weren’t valid or indeed worth anything.
According to Craft Beer and Brewing
Triangular Taste Test is one of the methods used in the sensory evaluation of beer. As its name implies, the triangular taste test involves the comparison of three separate samples. As a general rule, two of these samples are identical, whereas the third one is slightly different; the samples are assessed through a blind tasting. The test is designed to measure how easily subjects can perceive the difference in the disparate sample.
There are two common scenarios in which this style of testing is used. The most popular of these is when a brewery has tweaked the process or ingredients used to make one of their beers. The goal, in these cases, is to determine whether there is a detectable difference in the finished product. The other common use for the triangular taste test is to screen potential judges for tasting panels and, more specifically, to determine whether their palate is sensitive enough to detect the various compounds they will later be required to identify.
Some attribute the development of the triangular taste test to the research laboratory team at Carlsberg breweries. Records show that the test was first used there in 1923. It then came into common use at Carlsberg in the mid-1930s, when the research laboratory reworked its sensory evaluation program to yield better results. To this day, the triangular taste test is considered one of the more efficient sensory evaluation testing methods and is commonly used at breweries worldwide.
My confidence was luckily well founded; cup B was indeed the odd one out. Phew. It turned out to be the ‘Red’ beans. Cups A and C were obviously therefore the ‘Black’ beans. We then decided to put the ground beans through an espresso machine for further comparison. We tried the ‘Red’ beans and to be honest, whilst I didn’t object to the ‘Red’ beans through a cafetiere and in fact felt they had slightly more flavour than the ‘Black’ beans, as an espresso, they were way to citrusy and tart for my liking. The ‘Black’ beans which had seemed somewhat innocuous through a cafetiere were definitely more drinkable as an espresso. All very interesting, and quite a pleasant way to spend an hour.
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