Coffee, After
More notes from my trip.
Obvious disclaimer, if you're tired of it, don't read.
After a day with 11 hours of driving, 4 different flavours of Kerupuks (crisps, deep-fried something puffs, including buffalo skin, goat skin, shrimp-flavoured something, cassava), I am in a tiny office, air temp probably 90 and humid outside, and inside, no AC and the roaster's running. A tiny little sample roaster, and it's 8PM and we're going to do what we've come 8000 miles to do: taste coffee. My counterpart, their warehouse manager whose name I forget everytime I relearn it, something like Wurdi, is a little man, gamine is the first word that came to mind to describe him that night (it's the wrong word, he's not girlish per se, but he has features and mannerisms that would be charming on a young, graceless girl. On him, they're characture). He wears sandals, has delicate hands that he flips at the wrists, and the punniest sense of humour. Before leaving, I mused some on the difficulties of describing the flavour of coffee through translation; it turns out that that problem pales by comparison to keeping up with his rapid-fire puns and double-entendres. Mary's our intermediary, translating Bahasa Indonesia with a lot of gestures into her Oklahoma twang. After two days of having the world interpreted by someone who needs to maintain control, who aims to translate not just words but facts, it's a relief to have her throw up her hands, laugh, and say "I don't know."
We roast up two samples, a third was waiting when we arrived. The room grows hotter, sweat cannot bead on faces, it forms a gloss across the skin. Mary has a little fan that she waves; it's a relief to talk to her. Wurdi lines up the cups of coffee, three different samples, two cups of each and a cup of water each to rinse the spoon. The first step is to smell the grounds. Sniffing the first one, I can no longer smell just the close office and everyone's warmth--it's spicy, dark, warm, earthy, there's a pungence to it, agressive, Wurdi says "jagged." If the second one were a colour, it would be golden; there's a fruity syrupness to it, in fact it's all the fruitiness of sumatran coffees distilled into a cup, full body, etc. The water comes to a boil, is shut off and forgotten twice as we stumble to describe to each other what we smell.
Finally the water is poured, I break the crust on a few of the cups, belatedly remember that there are other people who may want to play along, share, and then start slurping. Mary's in the middle translating a funny hodge-podge of words, few of them probably off the Coffee Taster's Flavour Wheel that hangs above us for guidance. Maybe it's merely the euphoria that sets in from slurping coffee after sweating a few litres and not having had a cup in six days, but, although I lack the vocabulary to understand, the onomatopoeia of what Wurdi's saying describes the coffee beautifully.
Perfect specificity--when I was in the mountains the day before, I picked up and smelled a handfull of dirt--familiarity wafted over me: a smell in the grounds of Sumatran coffee. These coffees, what are the differences in place, processing, harvest time, anything, that makes it so that one is the essence of one set of the flavours that we know as Sumatran and the other, the essence of the other set? I ask for records, data, numbers, locations, villages--oh, I am always asking. But they live on the old black Compaq behind us and Lina's gone for the day, it's 8PM and we're leaving for another region in the morning. A hunch, maybe it's worth staying to unravel the mystery--a morning of pouring through Excel files, somewhere in them, lot numbers will tie back to tangible proper nouns, the standards of organic certification say that they must. But these samples are fresh from the fall harvest. The records have not made it down the mountain yet. I must be patient.
And then I am awake until 2AM, buzzing with coffee. Mary, Diego and I drink Bintang, the skunk of beers, in the hotel bar, that strange non-zone where a Chinese girl plays Greensleeves and then November Rain over and over on the piano. We've learned how to order finally--don't ask what kind of beers there are, there are but two kinds: Large Beer and Small Beer. In some places, not even that, just beer in a bottle or in a glass, same thing, same size, they'll just stand and pour it in a glass for you if you prefer. Our conversation wobbles back and forth--like dectectives, we want to understand the "why" of it all. How does this coffee taste one way and that one another? We've mused on the same things a hundred times over round the stainless "cupping table" in the warehouse, but here we're so close it's tempting to make the joke that you can taste it. I describe the processing plants, fields, dry mills I just saw and we theorize about what causes the idiosyncrasies in the beans...up until I'm laughing. The endless quest for causes. Two days later, another conversation, trying to pin down what caused the migration from a hunter-gatherer society to a less transient agricultural one. Etc.
Specificity. Causes. Large Beer or Small.
Obvious disclaimer, if you're tired of it, don't read.
After a day with 11 hours of driving, 4 different flavours of Kerupuks (crisps, deep-fried something puffs, including buffalo skin, goat skin, shrimp-flavoured something, cassava), I am in a tiny office, air temp probably 90 and humid outside, and inside, no AC and the roaster's running. A tiny little sample roaster, and it's 8PM and we're going to do what we've come 8000 miles to do: taste coffee. My counterpart, their warehouse manager whose name I forget everytime I relearn it, something like Wurdi, is a little man, gamine is the first word that came to mind to describe him that night (it's the wrong word, he's not girlish per se, but he has features and mannerisms that would be charming on a young, graceless girl. On him, they're characture). He wears sandals, has delicate hands that he flips at the wrists, and the punniest sense of humour. Before leaving, I mused some on the difficulties of describing the flavour of coffee through translation; it turns out that that problem pales by comparison to keeping up with his rapid-fire puns and double-entendres. Mary's our intermediary, translating Bahasa Indonesia with a lot of gestures into her Oklahoma twang. After two days of having the world interpreted by someone who needs to maintain control, who aims to translate not just words but facts, it's a relief to have her throw up her hands, laugh, and say "I don't know."
We roast up two samples, a third was waiting when we arrived. The room grows hotter, sweat cannot bead on faces, it forms a gloss across the skin. Mary has a little fan that she waves; it's a relief to talk to her. Wurdi lines up the cups of coffee, three different samples, two cups of each and a cup of water each to rinse the spoon. The first step is to smell the grounds. Sniffing the first one, I can no longer smell just the close office and everyone's warmth--it's spicy, dark, warm, earthy, there's a pungence to it, agressive, Wurdi says "jagged." If the second one were a colour, it would be golden; there's a fruity syrupness to it, in fact it's all the fruitiness of sumatran coffees distilled into a cup, full body, etc. The water comes to a boil, is shut off and forgotten twice as we stumble to describe to each other what we smell.
Finally the water is poured, I break the crust on a few of the cups, belatedly remember that there are other people who may want to play along, share, and then start slurping. Mary's in the middle translating a funny hodge-podge of words, few of them probably off the Coffee Taster's Flavour Wheel that hangs above us for guidance. Maybe it's merely the euphoria that sets in from slurping coffee after sweating a few litres and not having had a cup in six days, but, although I lack the vocabulary to understand, the onomatopoeia of what Wurdi's saying describes the coffee beautifully.
Perfect specificity--when I was in the mountains the day before, I picked up and smelled a handfull of dirt--familiarity wafted over me: a smell in the grounds of Sumatran coffee. These coffees, what are the differences in place, processing, harvest time, anything, that makes it so that one is the essence of one set of the flavours that we know as Sumatran and the other, the essence of the other set? I ask for records, data, numbers, locations, villages--oh, I am always asking. But they live on the old black Compaq behind us and Lina's gone for the day, it's 8PM and we're leaving for another region in the morning. A hunch, maybe it's worth staying to unravel the mystery--a morning of pouring through Excel files, somewhere in them, lot numbers will tie back to tangible proper nouns, the standards of organic certification say that they must. But these samples are fresh from the fall harvest. The records have not made it down the mountain yet. I must be patient.
And then I am awake until 2AM, buzzing with coffee. Mary, Diego and I drink Bintang, the skunk of beers, in the hotel bar, that strange non-zone where a Chinese girl plays Greensleeves and then November Rain over and over on the piano. We've learned how to order finally--don't ask what kind of beers there are, there are but two kinds: Large Beer and Small Beer. In some places, not even that, just beer in a bottle or in a glass, same thing, same size, they'll just stand and pour it in a glass for you if you prefer. Our conversation wobbles back and forth--like dectectives, we want to understand the "why" of it all. How does this coffee taste one way and that one another? We've mused on the same things a hundred times over round the stainless "cupping table" in the warehouse, but here we're so close it's tempting to make the joke that you can taste it. I describe the processing plants, fields, dry mills I just saw and we theorize about what causes the idiosyncrasies in the beans...up until I'm laughing. The endless quest for causes. Two days later, another conversation, trying to pin down what caused the migration from a hunter-gatherer society to a less transient agricultural one. Etc.
Specificity. Causes. Large Beer or Small.