Bean there: Coffee tasting proves far harder than assessing wine

standing in front of six small white bowls of freshly brewed coffee in the “cupping” room at Market Lane, one of Melbourne’s leading small-batch coffee roasters.

On the other side of the table Jason Scheltus, one of the partners in the business and head roaster, is bent over another row of six identical bowls, hands clasped behind his back in concentration, intently inhaling the aromas of each brew.

I’ve come to learn how to taste coffee. In my day job as wine writer for this newspaper, I’m immersed in the rituals and jargon of swirling, sniffing, sipping and spitting a line-up of spicy shirazes or cheeky chardonnays. But coffee tasting is an undiscovered country - and, as I’m quickly finding out, it’s a far more convoluted and precise process than any wine tasting I’ve ever been to.

“We do coffee cuppings for a number of reasons,” says Scheltus. “We do it when we’re evaluating batches of coffee beans we might want to purchase. We do it when we’re evaluating how well we’ve roasted each batch of coffee. And we do cuppings for the public, to educate them about what different coffees and roasting styles taste like.”

The first step in the process is to grind into a bowl exactly 12g of each of the six coffees under evaluation.

The taster then smells each bowl, assessing “dry aroma”, looking for subtle differences and possible flaws such as a musty smell caused by mouldy beans. Then, exactly the same amount - 180ml - of just-boiled water at 92C is poured into each bowl, and the coffees are left to brew for a while.

“This is the international standard for assessing coffee,” says Market Lane coffee educator Jenni Bryant.

“It’s the way it’s done all around the world. So when we say to our suppliers in, say, Brazil that we’ve tasted their coffee, they know exactly how we’ve tasted it.

“It’s also a technique that you can use anywhere: imagine you’re travelling in a remote part of South America - even if you have no electricity you can still taste coffee the same way.”

After a few minutes, Scheltus and Bryant take a spoon and break the crust of coffee grounds that has formed on the surface of each bowl. As they do so, they bend over, their noses almost touching the liquid, and breathe deeply. But, unlike wine tasters, who can spend minutes swirling and sniffing, these coffee tasters move quickly on to sipping - because that’s where the most important flavour information is found.

Scheltus spoons some of the clear brown liquid into his mouth with a sharp sucking sound, like a bad mannered guest slurping soup. “This cools the coffee down,” says Bryant. “But it also sprays the coffee right across your palate so you can taste the sweetness and bitterness and acidity, and get a clear picture of the aromas.”

This I’m familiar with.

You often see wine people making curious soup-sucking noises, to aerate the wine in their mouths and force aroma molecules into the retronasal passage at the back of the throat so that the olfactory bulb behind the nostrils can clearly perceive the wine’s smells and flavours.

So I put my tastebuds and olfactory bulb to work on coffee number one.

Sip, slurp, suck, spit (like wine tasting, spitting is highly advisable during cupping: just imagine how wired you be after tasting six coffees in quick succession).

“Light?” I venture, uncertain. “A bit ... astringent ... um, austere?” I’m struggling for adjectives, not sure what I’m meant to be looking for.

“Hmm, interesting,” says Bryant, smiling cryptically.

“Peanut skin,” says Scheltus, absolutely nailing with his two-word description the coffee’s delicate papery bitterness and slightly sweet nutty flavour.

“That’s very typical of this Brazilian coffee; it’s a combination of the variety of coffee bean, the altitude of the plantation, that kind of thing.”

Again, we’re in familiar territory: as every wine lover knows, where the grapes are grown - the terroir - and the variety of grape used both have a huge influence on the character and style of the wine produced. Coffee’s the same - as the second sample clearly demonstrates.

Sip, slurp, suck, spit. It has a much brighter flavour: rounder, sweeter, more delicious, more balanced.

“Nectarine, peach - stone fruit,” says Scheltus, nailing it again. “This is a higher grown coffee, from Bolivia, which is why it has more acidity and complexity.”

By coffee number four, I’m either beginning to get the hang of it - or coffee number four is just easy to describe because it’s bursting with character.

“Wow!” I say, on first sip. “Tropical fruit, but also a meaty flavour, like sweet ham. Durian? Complex. Incredible.”

Scheltus smiles. “There’s certainly a lot going on,” he says. “It’s Ethiopian coffee, from the Yirgacheffe region.

The beans go through a natural, uncontrolled fermentation process, which is why the coffee has all those wild flavours. But some roasters consider these characters a fault.”

Again, the parallels with wine are strong. The influence of winemaking techniques can also be polarising: your “deliciously toasty” shiraz might be my “horribly over-oaked” shiraz.

As we taste the last coffee - a sample chosen to demonstrate the bitter charcoal taste of over-roasted beans - Bryant draws a final analogy with wine.

There’s a huge difference between large volume popular wine brands, blended to provide a consistent drinking experience, and small wineries where every vintage is different. Coffee’s the same, says Bryant.

“A lot of commercial coffee blends are roasted very dark to mask defects and provide consistency of flavour from one batch to the next,” she says.

“We roast each batch of coffee just enough to showcase its unique flavour - and our customers recognise that the next batch is going to be different. What we’re saying is, let’s get excited about and celebrate these differences.”