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| By tonx |
Finca Mauritania's cascara - dried coffee cherry pulp courtesy of Square Mile. Packs a serious caffeine jolt. Tastes fruity, sweet, slightly mushroomy... strange and enjoyable.
Coffee Cherry Husk Infusion
Its Sunday, so...
Need a pick me up? Apparently...
Language of coffee
There is a lot of slang surrounding coffee, however there are a few well recognised technical terms. Some of those are described below.
Acidity - The pleasant tartness of a fine coffee. Acid also describes coffee components which produce indigestion or nervousness in some individuals.
Aroma - Describes the odor of freshly brewed coffee.
Body - The sense of heaviness, richness or thickness when one tastes coffee.
Bright - Describes a lively mouth feel.
Cupping Coffee - A trade phrase describing the art of extracting and tasting flavors from a small amount of ground beans brewed in a clear glass. This is the truest method to appraise good and bad characteristics in beans by taste and sight.
Flavor - What distinguishes the taste of coffee once its acidity, body and aroma have been described.
Light - Describes a thin, bright flavor.
Mellow - Sweet bodied and smooth.
Rich - A full, heavy, sweet flavor.
Sweet - Free from harshness in flavor.
Winey - Distinct and fruit-like taste.
Earthy - The tones that reflect soil characteristics.
Describing coffee
The easiest way to remember basic coffee descriptions
is to remember them by region. Coffees from the same region usually
share similar characteristics
Africa: (key word: WINEY) fruity or winey acidity, complex flavor, medium to heavy body, often have "chocolate" or "wild" notes. Coffees from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen.I'm sure there are other out there, although this covers the broadest groups. I quite like the smoother blends. What is your favourite type?
Indonesia: (key word: SMOOTH) heavy bodied, light acidity, mellow, take cream well, dessert coffees, smooth and mild. Coffees from Sumatra, Java and Celebes.
The Americas: (key word: SNAPPY) bright acidity, light to medium bodied, good breakfast coffees, best taken black, straightforward. Coffees from Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
Dark Roasts: Acidity is muted by the roast, full bodied and smooth, roasted flavor, good with milk--flavor comes through well. These include French and Italian coffees
Bring the Muse
From Honore de Balzac (translated by Robert Onopa)
Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
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