Kettles on and Chrissy wishlists out. Can you smell that velvety aroma? Coffee’s up.
The coffee connoisseurs behind ST.ALi are tackling the hotly-debated question: ‘can you really tell the difference between a good and a bad cup o’ joe?’ by launching the world’s first at-home coffee curriculum, ‘Learn to Taste Coffee.’
For those of us that simply refuse to do life without a double shot espresso, caffeine is akin to religion. It’s a refined ritual, an expensive habit, and a ridiculously good pick-me-up for mornings when everything is feeling a bit blugh. The coffee run is such an embedded habit in many of our lives, but we rarely stop and take a swig of our liquid gold, swish it around and spit it out to thoroughly contemplate what kind of undertones of berry can be detected. That would be absolutely absurd, right?
Hmmm, we thought with a hefty degree of skepticism, when ST.ALi invited us into the kitchen to learn how to taste coffee. We’re used to downing our lattes much like a teenager takes to a bottle of vodka on a schoolies stint. But what if our barista asked us to conjure up what flavours that latte is infused with? How does the Colombian blend in our favourite Fitzroy morning pitstop differ from the Ethiopian-derived offering up the road? We’d probably shake our heads in dismay as our tastebuds obviously can’t differentiate those subtle discrepancies. Nah-uh. No way jose.
Or can they?
This what the coffee industry pros train to do, tasting extensive amounts of the stuff in a sipping session and comparing flavours, textures and degrees of roasting goodness to discern what is good and what can stay in the bag. Their tastebuds are like wildly sensitive, highly-trained ninjas, separating chocolatey notes from woody nuances. It’s thoroughly impressive stuff.
Think of ‘Learn to Taste Coffee’ as a take-home, interactive and ridiculously fascinating ‘Coffee Guide for Dummies’. While the bona fide Melburnian likes to think they could tell the difference between a $1 7-Eleven latte and beans that would start a bidding war in a coffee auction, most of us actually can’t. We simply don’t know how to.
‘Learn To Taste Coffee’ provides the opportunity for you to slurp up a brew like one of those coffee bosses, curating a sequence of coffees for the purpose of teaching. After completing the four modules, you’ll know what everything on a cafe menu or bag label actually means; Roast, Quality, Processing, Origin. Each of the modules uses three coffees to teach one tasting lesson.
For example, the Roast Module has the exact same coffee bean roasted three different ways; light, medium, dark. After you taste those three coffees next to each-other, you’ll know what roast does to the taste of coffee, because that will be the only difference between the coffees – kinda cool, we know.
So what can you expect inside? The full course pack includes all the essentials you need to get your barista on. It includes three cupping bowls and a cupping spoon, a hand grinder, digital scales, a Clever Dripper (not sure what this is? you’ll know soon enough!), filter papers, 12 x 50g module coffees, 250g of Single Origin and the ‘Learn To Taste Coffee’ booklet along with links to video classes. Phwoar.
There’s clearly a direct correlation between understanding and appreciation here. If you want to make coffee taste even better, head on over to www.stali.com.au and get your mitts on the course.