Heard the one about the coffee bean that is found in the, ahem, waste matter of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradouras hermaphroditus)?
Well, living a sheltered life in the beer world, I hadn’t, until the other day when I visited Taylors of Harrogate for a bit of coffee tasting.
Apparently, the weasel or cat-like beast produces the Kopi Luwack, the most expensive coffee bean in the world, from its bottom. First it eats the red berry containing the bean or seed and then the enzymes in the civet’s stomach get to work to add flavour before nature takes its course. Then some poor blighter has to retrieve it.Makes brewing ale look very simple. Apparently, to reassure the fastidious, all the washing drying and roasting gets rid of any lingering,er, unpleasantness. So don't worry.
Now what, I hear you ask, is a beer writer doing wasting drinking time tasting coffee? Good question. But life never ceases to surprise with the Beer Writers Guild.
A few of us visited the inner sanctum of the famous Yorkshire tea and coffee emporium that is the sibling of the even more famously indulgent Bettys tearooms (famous in Yorkshire anyway, and that must make them the most famous in the world), to taste a few coffees and sober up a bit We'd just enjoyed a visit to the much venerated Roosters Brewery (more of that later) of Knaresborough.
Now coffee for me is normally just a bit of a pick me up about 11am. After dinner coffee, pah, I've never really seen the point, unless you are the unfortunate soul that is driving. However, this was interesting. And coming immediately after a sampling of Roosters’ ales, it sort of pointed up the similarities of this tasting malarkey.
Funnily enough, though, we spat it out. Just to avoid getting a bit manic, I guess. This was a wee bit tricky. Thank goodness we hadn’t done that at Roosters - far too good to waste.
The ebullient Mike Riley took us through the whole coffee buying process. Blimey, not being much of a supermarket shopper, I never realised there was so much to it. We tasted coffees from India, Sumatra, Jamaica, Rwanda, Brazil and Ethiopia, the birthplace of the stuff apparently, and other parts of the globe I had hardly heard off. And this was real coffee with character, not the homogenised stuff that comes ready to jump in the pot.
And that’s where the synergy with ale creeps in. Like craft ales, as opposed to the industrial stuff, this is all about quality and provenance. And Taylors is highly committed to ethical sourcing, making sure that its suppliers offer fair play to their workers just as they are pledged to paying a fair price. This touches a cord - I know of a few pub companies that could usefully take a tea leaf out of their book here.
Eee tho’, what a job that Mike has eh? Coffee, as it happens, is a very tropical plant and can thrive only in hot countries, so, as Chief Coffee Taster (oh yes), he gets to jet off to sun spots all over the world to inspect crops – a bit like the Del Monte man. Who would have thought life could be so exciting in the world of brewing up a cuppa?
Anyway, back to the tasting. The trick, apparently, is to draw the coffee across the palate with a slurp – so it hits all the taste buds - and then deftly aim a quick gob at the spittoon. Mike could do it as smoothly as a magician produces a rabbit. The rest of us, well, noisy and messy, very,very, messy. Watching a post luncheon cohort of beer writers do this is not a pretty sight.
Just as erstwhile wine trade man Sean Franklin at Roosters expounds passionately about fruity hop flavours, Mike too waxes lyrical about hints of grapefruit from Kenya, nutty flavours from Nicaragua, the caramel sweetness of Colombian and full flavoured chocolate from Sumatra.
And then there is Monsoon Malabar. Now this is an interesting story. It’s sort of reverse of the India Pale Ale tale of the 1800s, whereby the beer improved as it negotiated the dodgy 18,000 mile journey around the Cape to reach the sub continent. This stuff came the other way to please the well-to-do Victorians. It too benefit ted from jollying along in the trade winds, developing smokey and spicy qualities that seemed to go down well with 19th century taste buds.
However, the advent of the Suez canal speeded the job up a bit too much, and as a consequence the coffee lost some its flavour. So now the conditions of the sea journey are recreated by opening the doors on vast warehouses in the monsoon season. This creates moist air around the coffee beans, causing them to swell and develop, before being shipped out.
Yes, there’s a lot more to coffee than I ever imagined. No longer now will I glibly throw a teaspoon or two in the pot of a morning as my thoughts dwell on the delights of a fine cask ale. No, no, now I will pause and reflect on the exotic and exciting world of coffee. And I’ll spare a thought for the long suffering civets, dutifully passing those beans for our delight as I ponder – does it hurt much?
0 comments:
Post a Comment