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Too Many Spices Spoil the Soup

So I went a little crazy with this week's attempt at an espresso blend, which included the following: 40% Brazil, 30% Yemen Mokha, 20% Aged Sumatra, and 10% Monsooned robusta from India. I like my espresso to have a bit of spice to it, and so I thought I'd go for broke and toss in the funkiest stuff I had on hand. The Yemen Mokha has been our favorite general coffee of late -- a medium body with a great peppery / leathery thing going on as it goes down, so that was in in high proportion. Then not just any Sumatra, but an aged Sumatra, and not just a dash of robusta, but a dash of monsooned robusta. (As you can see, "aging" and "monsooning" does something weird to coffee beans; 99% of the green coffee you see is going to look like the Yemen and the Brazil do here, rather than brown or yellow like the others.) The result was definitely funky, just not the sort of funky you can groove to. Forget calling to mind any particular spice or spices -- this stuff tasted like everything in the spice cabinet, all messed up together at once, and all followed by an aftertaste something akin to a mouthful of dirty pennies. Ok then, point taken: I think I'll go back to basics, and from here on out do my tinkering in increments. Too many spices that spoiled this soup, for sure.

Heavy chocolates, with hints of strawberry

As Wonderwood and many others are aware, I've recently started to roast my own coffee beans (more on this to come). Since the weather has turned hot, I've turned more and more to shots of espresso pulled on the Rancilio Silvia that currently beautifies my kitchen to get my morning fix. After trying a few of the blends available from Sweet Maria's (far and away the web's best purveyor of premium coffee beans), I've recently tried my hand at making up some blends of my own. I've been going at it blind, after having done a small bit of reading up on the basics of it. This weekend I hit a real winner that in its own way shows how bucking the conventional wisdom can often mean you strike gold. I started with a dry-processed Brazil as a base (60%), added a Sulawesi for body (20%), and threw in a Kenya (20%) just to see what would happen. Brazils, when pushed to a Full City or a Vienna roast, are often described as lending flavors of dark or bittersweet chocolate to the cup. This has become something of the ideal for an espresso -- many espresso blends are in fact 100% Brazils, and that deep chocolatey aftertaste is the hallmark of a well-pulled shot. So with 60% Brazil, I figured I was relatively safe. Mouthfeel is particularly important to me with espresso, and having been disappointed with a thin-tasting Brazil/Colombia/Ethiopia belnd I'd cooked up before, I added the syrupy Sulawesi to bulk it up a bit. Having promptly forgotten my reading up, I also threw in the Kenya, which almsot everyone says is a bad idea: too much acid, too jammy tasting, etc. -- a great way to ruin the cup. Good Kenya's are often described as tasting of strawberries, just like a really good Ethiopia Harar will taste almost like blueberries. And this time around, serendipity delivered. Now, I'm the first one to say that the descriptors often used to describe the taste of wines and coffees are, as Captain Barbossa might say, more guidelines than anything else. But with the Brazil and the Kenya in there (and admittedly the Kenya in pretty small proportion), I ended up with a shot that tastes -- I swear -- like chocolate covered strawberries.