Did you know that the coffee in your cup was once a cherry? If so, you’re way ahead of me. I’m even astounded to learn that, unlike money, coffee grows on trees. Coffee cherries start off green, ripen to red, and once they are picked the green beans inside are dug out of the centre. And that’s just the start of a long process that, according to the UK coffee expertise manager of Nespresso, Jonathon Sims, is like “a wonderful alchemy of great science and intuition – coffee blending and roasting really is an art”.
As I wrote in my first blog, I am woefully ignorant about coffee. I drink it in industrial quantities, almost always from instant granules. But I never savour it. This. Must. Change. I appreciate wine, and know which regions and grapes I prefer – why not coffee?
So I’ve used my phone-a-friend lifeline, and asked the expert. The real skill, Jonathon tells me, is in complementing, or blending, coffees from different regions and then roasting them to develop their full potential. One of the techniques they use to is to “split-roast” the beans. In other words each component of the blend needs a unique roast. “It’s like a restaurant chef creating a dish,” explains Jonathon. “You wouldn’t cook the meat and the vegetables for the same amount of time, would you? Sometimes you’ll do a short, light roast to get particular notes to come out; whereas sometimes, in a blend like Dharkan, for example, one part of the blend is created with a much longer roast at lower temperature to bring out the persistent cocoa note without it getting bitter.”
Dharkan is a blend of arabicas from Latin America and Asia, giving “a greater palette to play with: a great espresso should have a lot of dimensions, like perfume. You get the first notes, then gradually new ones emerge.”
Single-origin coffees, by contrast, “give you a real sense of a specific region”. Jonathon waxes lyrical about the Nespresso Bukeela ka Ethiopia Pure Origin Grand Cru – Ethiopia, of course, being the birthplace of coffee. It takes the wild, musky notes from western Ethiopian beans, which are roasted darker and shorter to add body, and adds floral, bergamot notes from the southern Sidama region, roasted longer and lighter.
More than anything, I’m impressed by Jonathon’s passion. And though the beans are put through a vast contraption of roasting and cooling chambers – the likes of which Breaking Bad’s Walter White would envy – I’m starting to see how the artistry of the Nespresso taste-makers is even more important than science when it comes to blending and roasting the different years’ changing beans.
Join me next month, as I put these new tastes to the test.
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