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July 16, 2007

How to hold a coffee tasting

coffee

(Monica Lopossay/Sun Photographer)

According to the Passion for Coffee Web site, our senses can detect 800 flavor characteristics of coffee as compared to only 400 for red wine. This led the pr person for Saeco USA, which is launching seven new home espresso machines this year, to send me a release saying that coffee tastings are a "hot new trend" in home entertaining.

Well, I don't know about that, but if you're interested in trying a coffee tasting, or "cupping," as it's called, here's how: ...

  • Once you select your bean, take a quarter ounce of coarse ground roasted coffee.
  • Heat five ounces of water to just below the boiling point.
  • Pour the water over the coffee in a circular motion.
  • Dip a spoon into the cup (with your nose close to the cup) so that it breaks the top layer of the coffee grinds that floated to the top.
  • Take approximately half a spoonful of the liquid from the cup.
  • Quaff it with a loud slurping noise (the noise is made so that you can mix the liquid with the air, spraying it directly over your tongue).
  • Savor, swish once, and then spit out the liquid.
  • Let me know how it goes.
  • Posted by Elizabeth Large at 7:45 AM | | Comments (1)
            

    Comments

    Wow, not sure if I can do that coffee tasting with the $600 a pound coffee...anyone know where I can get that "kopi luwak" locally?

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    About this blog
    Richard Gorelick was appointed The Baltimore Sun's restaurant critic in September 2010. Before joining the paper staff fulltime, he contributed freelance criticism and features articles about food to area and regional publications. Along the way, he dispatched for short-distance trucking companies, shilled for cultural non-profits, and assisted in cognitive neurology research – never the subject, always the control.

    He takes restaurants seriously but not himself, and his favorite restaurant is the one you love, too.
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