Comments are welcome, as I can still make changes to the design. My previous attempt was a bit crude but passable. However, I found that I needed to create a logo in vector graphics format to allow scaling with minimum pixelation. Who knew love of coffee involved so much computer expertise.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of coffee cupping, the process by which coffee buyers and roasters assess beans in as diagnostic a manner as a personal thing like taste can be. When you see descriptions of coffee and the flavors you can expect from a particular bean, they are often based on the results of one or more cupping sessions. Of course, what you taste in your cup will be dependent on a number of factors including the age of the beans, how they were roasted and how you brew the coffee. Yet, the public appears largely ignorant of the importance of cupping to the industry, unlike say the wine industry.
Although akin to the sip-and-spit approach used for wine tasting, a coffee cupping should not be confused with a coffee tasting. One major difference, a cupping does not involve brewing coffee in a traditional sense, but is more akin to steeping tea. In essence, the process is meant to be consistent and to exhibit as many of a coffee’s flavors as possible, the good and the bad. IMHO, any brewing method should ideally be aimed at bringing out the coffee’s best qualities.
Calling it a diagnostic process may make it sound a bit dull, but cupping is rarely a boring process. Witness the colorful wheel above, which represents just some of the more common aromas and flavors you can expect from a well-heeled coffee. I recently cupped a coffee that when ground threw off the distinct fragrance of fruitloops. Others smell like caramel, cinnamon, peaches, blueberry, mildew, fresh-cut grass or truffles. And that’s before you add water.
Coffee cupping is the way professionals begin to dig into the deep well of flavors that is hidden just below the surface of the coffee bean. Without this process, we would be lost in the wilderness without a compass (or perhaps in this day and age, a GPS navigator). It is one way roasters ensure that they are using the best-quality beans available.
With temperatures peaking at close to 100 degrees, this seems like a really good time to roll out some recipes for ice coffee. I have been using both the below methods to produce pleasing cups of ice coffee:
Cold brewing is a great way to make large quantities of concentrated coffee. It makes a really rich and bold cup of coffee that goes great with a little milk. This coffee concentrate has a fairly long shelf life of four to five days, if refrigerated.
Generally, I am making large quantities of this brew, enough for a couple dozen cups, although each cup only takes about 4-5 ounces of coffee, the rest being made up of ice. As with other brewing techniques, it pays to play with the amount of coffee you are using, but my current formula is to use about 2.5 ounces of coffee per pint of water. I also prefer to use glass jar for steeping the coffee. The coffee should be ground very course, even more coarsely than for a French press, if possible. The grounds will be brewing for hours, so they will have plenty of time to absorb water despite the limited surface area. Stir the grounds well to make sure that they are thoroughly wetted. You can expect a lot of expansion initially and you should leave the lid loose as the coffee will continue releasing CO2 that will need to escape as it steeps. Place the steeping coffee into a refrigerator or cool spot for around 12 hours.
Once the steep time is up, straining the coffee can be a slow and arduous, and until you work out a good system, messy as well. I suggest doing this in stages. I have used both a cloth canning strainer and a regular metal kitchen strainer to do the initial filtering. If you let the resulting liquid sit for a few minutes, a lot of the fines will drop to the bottom of the container forming a sort of muddy paste. I then pour the brew through a manual drip cone (the more holes the better, see drip coffee above) with a metal filter. Finally, I filter it one more time through a paper filter. It can take a half hour or more for the coffee to drip through on this last step, so you may want to go off and do something else while gravity does its work. I should probably mention at this point, that there are a couple of brewers designed to take a lot of the effort out of this process. Toddy and Filtron both make equipment for cold brewing that stores the steeping coffee and allows you to filter out the brew at the end. These can be bulky and are definitely pricier than the DYI method, but can also reduce the potential messiness.
With the cold brew ready, fill a glass all the way up with ice and pour over the coffee and enjoy.
For a less time-consuming approach, ice coffee can also be hot brewed. A lot of restaurants and coffee shops will prepare their coffee normally and then place it in the refrigerator, to be poured over ice when needed. This is, however, not the preferred method for brewing ice coffee. Instead, I recommend brewing concentrated coffee directly over ice, not unlike you would get in a Vietnamese restaurant, but without the sweetened condensed milk (unless you are into that kind of thing).
For hot brewing, you want to fill a container of known capacity about 3/4 full of ice. Using the pour-over method outlined earlier, increase the recommend the dose of coffee by about 20%, based on the capacity of your container. The idea is to make a really strong cup of coffee, since the melting ice will get mixed in with it. I find it preferable to use a glass vessel, a jar or glass, so that I can see how much coffee is filling the container. The hot coffee will melt most of the ice, so if I a making a glass to drink immediately, I leave some room at the top to add more ice cubes after brewing.
The hot-brew technique actually gives you a very different flavor profile than the cold brew. While the cold brew is bold and flavorful, it lacks a lot of the complexity of hot brewed coffee. By contrast, the hot brewed ice coffee will be much brighter and exhibit some of the more subtle tones of the coffee.
