Category — Coffee Education

In a nod to the classic style of apprenticeship from ye olden days, the Lincoln, Nebraska, coffeeshop Cultiva Coffee is offering a literal apprenticeship program for baristas, roasters, and even managers.

By “classic” I mean that applicants would travel to Lincoln and stay in the owners’ home, working at the shop 30 hours a week in exchange for training in one of a number of offered programs: Barista Training, Roaster Training, and Small Business Management. Programs last four weeks each, or you can stay for three months and take all three. Here’s a few details on the offered programs as listed on Cultiva’s website:

1. Barista Training (4 weeks)
Latte art, speed training, coffee agronomy and history, and insight on training for regional barista competitions. By the time your training is complete, you will know the basics and be able to demonstrate barista skills that are as seen in regional and national barista SCAA competitions. Jon Ferguson has served as both a NWRBC Sensory Judge and MRBC Technical Judge. Ferguson initially received barista training as an employee at Zoka Coffee Company in Seattle, Washington in 2005. He started Cultiva Coffee Roasting Company in the Fall of 2006, and has been roasting and pouring rosettas ever since!

2. Roasting (4-8 weeks)
We won’t just flip a switch and burn some coffee. I’ll go into depth about buying green coffees from importers, how to get your business certified organic and fair trade. We’ll track our flow of inventory, measure weight loss, discuss “degrees of roast” and how to define them for yourself, how to package, promote, and sell roasted coffees to cafés, bakeries, grocery stores, etc. We will learn how to roast with a few different stylistic approaches, maintain roast logs, and will gain experience on properly maintaining and cleaning a Diedrich IR-12 roaster.

3. Small business management (4 weeks)
I’ll be more transparent with my books than one may expect. I’ll show you our filing cabinet, how I keep them, the problems I’ve had in the past and present and how I fixed it. I’ll basically give you Cultiva’s paperwork ‘tour’ through our filings, talk about city codes, permits, building-out space, loan documents, etc.

It sounds like a fascinating opportunity, and I hope anyone who takes up Ferguson’s offer blogs about the experience. Particularly because the in-shop roasting machine is Espresso Vivace’s old Deidrich IR-12; I live around the corner from Vivace here in Seattle and can vouch for the fact that that machine turns out some of the best coffee possible, making it a great machine to learn on. I can’t refrain from mentioning, however, that my only reservation–besides the obvious disadvantages of spending up to three months away from home with no income, but that’s surmountable–is that Ferguson doesn’t seem to have a lot of experience as a roaster. If I understand his website correctly, then he’s been a barista for less than three years and a roaster for barely one. He clearly has at least some level of real expertise, having served as a judge in two of the official regional barista championships, and he’s got a hell of a machine, so even without the resume it should be worth it to consider the program if you’re new to the coffee industry and serious about learning as much as you can in a short amount of time.

Despite its color, coffee is basically 95% water. You might guess as a result that water quality is critically important to whether an otherwise fine coffee tastes great or just okay–and you’d be right.

Recently Klaus Thomsen of the Coffee Collective felt that the city line water in his native Copenhagen was negatively affecting the delicate qualities of his roasted coffee, so he decided to do a blind taste test with waters filtered in different ways. According to Klaus:

Since we have experimented and tested a lot of water systems before we had narrowed the field down quite a bit:
1) Bottled spring water from Eden.
2) Reverse Osmosis filtered water.
3) Water+More/HOH’s new Bestmax filter.

We did the test mainly to try out the new Bestmax filter, which is a carbon and ion-exchange, four-step filter unit specifically designed for coffee.

Using the water to brew two different coffees, Klaus and co. did a blind taste test to see how each type of water affected the final cup. According to his post, the Bestmax filter performed the best, not tainting the coffee in any discernible way; largely thanks to an adjustable ion exchanger to allow calibration for different types of incoming water (i.e., from different sources). It’s not unlike achieving a flat frequency response in a loudspeaker, with the ion exchanger acting like an equalizer to compensate for any flaws in the incoming signal.

Find out how critical water can be to coffee and check out the full details of the experiment here.

It sounds like a Zen koan, but there’s a method behind the madness of the question. People typically associate arabica beans with specialty (i.e., good) coffee and Robusta beans with commodity (i.e., bad) coffee. But the specialty coffee craze of the last twenty years has had an effect on the coffee market, an effect that challenges the usual notions of what good and bad coffee is.

Many coffee consumers wouldn’t be surprised to know that the largest coffee-producing country in the world is Brazil. But what they may not know is that Brazil is also the leading producer of low-grown, “junk” arabica–coffee plants that are grown near sea level in non-volcanic, non-forested soil. The crops are more volatile than Robustas grown in the same soil, but the arabica name commands enough of a higher price that growers find it worth the risk, and employ pesticides and other non-organic methods to preserve the crop. Most if not all the “100% arabica” blends offered by the usual store brands such as Maxwell House, Folger’s, etc. consist of this “junk” arabica. The beans are technically arabica, but the beans were produced without care in bad soil and can’t carry the same flavor notes or terroir of quality, high-grown arabica. You may recall that purines from the soil and sucrose production are responsible for the flavor of coffee, and while arabica is more capable of this production than Robusta, growing it at a low altitude in comparatively dry grassland soil prevents this production. So just because something says “arabica” on the package doesn’t mean you’re getting quality coffee.

Perhaps more surprising is the notion that just because a coffee is Robusta doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting bad coffee. One of the most exciting things to happen in the coffee industry in the past ten years has been the arrival of quality Robusta coffees from India. India started experimenting with high-grown Robustas some time ago, presumably to weather the typical volatility of the specialty coffee market, and the Coffee Board of India has started pushing these Robustas into the market–facing initial resistance right up to the moment they’re tasted.

Probably the best single-origin coffee I have ever cupped that wasn’t a Wallingford Blue Mountain was a 2004 Kaapi Royale from Josuma Coffee, which is a high-grown Robusta. It was an endlessly complex coffee, with intense notes of blueberry and vanilla bean giving way to milk chocolate, then honey, then dark chocolate and rich tobacco, cedar, and cardamom. You could pretty much throw a dart at the entire flavor wheel and hit something this coffee had in spades. It’s hard to sell without holding tastings, however, because the moment someone reads “Robusta” on the bag they’ll naturally wonder why you’re selling them “cheap” coffee. Once they taste a true quality Robusta, however, their minds always change.

Quality Robustas are hard to find; many shops won’t carry them because of the expense and the name’s negative connotations. I’ve seen several shops carry it as a kind of “back-door” thing where you have to specially ask for it, as if you were in a speakeasy. But if you can find a shop that carries an Indian Robusta, give it a try. You’ll almost certainly be surprised.