PANAMA FLOREAL SHB

A friend says to me. 

"I can't believe you go to church every Sunday."

When I think about it, I find it amazing too.   Maybe it's a miracle.   At some point, the idea that the world is built on language (the Word) was planted in me as the Cross, and it didn't go away even after I fell down on the street and experienced a merciless disconnection of consciousness where there was really nothing. 

 

The reason I'm prefacing this article with a statement of faith is because I want to talk about how to drink coffee well.

As coffee becomes more and more a part of our daily lives and more and more valuable as a commodity, it is graded and priced accordingly.  As a result, beans like Panama Esmeralda Farms' Gesha, Jamaica's Blue Mountain, Hawaiian Kona, or animal cruelty controversial Kopi Luwak and Black Ivory are worth their weight in gold and hard to come by.   In this day and age, we can't afford to pay $4 or $5 for a cup of coffee, but to taste and buy coffee that costs tens or hundreds of dollars a cup is a challenge for most people.  

While it's hard to drink expensive coffee, it's actually not that hard to drink good coffee.  Good coffee is delicious coffee.  Good coffee is made with good flavor and aroma.  Of course, if you get greedy for the taste of coffee, you can distinguish the flavor and aroma by the type of coffee tree, the characteristics of the land where the green beans are grown, the year of production, the cultivation method, and the harvesting method, You are amazed at the flavors and aromas that change depending on the amount and time of heat used to roast the beans, the grind of the coffee, the characteristics of the tools used to brew the coffee, the characteristics of the water, and even the flavor of the coffee itself, which changes depending on who is sitting in front of you and when and where you drink it.

Imagine drinking a cup of coffee, and you'll notice its flavor and aroma.  Initially, the flavors and aromas of coffee come to us as a huge clump. The way to enjoy coffee is to separate the flavors and aromas from the clump, strand by strand, and feel the individual flavors. And the best tool to do that is language.  

Coffee is like drawing a rainbow of colors with crayons on a piece of construction paper, and then overlaying it with black crayon.  Each time you scrape away the black, you reveal another strand of beautifully different colors underneath.   With each sip of coffee, the taste cells in our mouths and the olfactory cells in our nasal passages scratch away and reveal beautiful colors, and we just have to give them names.  Naming these different and beautiful colors is the process of tasting coffee, the process of feeling and making good coffee.  

A great coffee to start with is the Panama Floreal SHB, which is a great way to distinguish the flavors that are clustered together.  The bitterness of the dark chocolate and the sweet acidity of the lemon and pear are clearly distinguishable, and if you brew the coffee and water at a ratio of 1:16 or more, it almost feels like tea, so it's fun to taste the complex flavors of the coffee without feeling overwhelmed.  Of course, distinguishing between flavors and aromas isn't the only way to enjoy a good cup of coffee. You can also enjoy flavors and aromas in reverse.  We will introduce the coffee that goes with it next time.