Only hours after our Nordic Roaster victory, I had to get on a plane leaving for Colombia. My quest is to be a jury member of the 2008 Colombia Cup of Excellence.
After 24 hours of travelling I arrived Manizales, where the cup tasting will take place.
Today, Monday he 15th, the jury of about 30 professional cup tasters from around the world cupped 3 rounds of 8 samples with 4 cups in each sample.
In the first 2 rounds we cupped the same 8 samples in the same order. It might seem a bit silly, but it took some time to get used to the slightly darker roast profile than I am used to as well as water and air at 2200 meters above sea level. The water boils at about 93 degrees celsius which means the coffee cools a lot faster than at sea level. It was also a very good excersize to cup the same coffees in 3 rounds, where the order was the same in the 2 first rounds and in the 3rd round the coffees had been switched around randomly in order to challenge the judges to find the coffee’s number from the 2 previous rounds. This was a good way to check how consistent we are judging.
I was happy to see that I scored very consistently, except for one coffee where I came over some defects in one of the rounds.
I have to say that the coffees we cupped today was not fantastic, but fortunately they did not get high enough scores to reach the Cup of Excellence competition. ( A coffee needs more than 84 points out of 100, consistently through the 5 screenings that the Clomombian jury has gone through before the international jury gets to taste the coffees.) This means that we will probably taste much better coffees from tomorrow and on, when the real competition-cupping starts.
I can’t wait to start the tasting tomorrow and it will also be fun to see if I am as consistent in my scoring as I was today throughout the next 4 days, because at most we will cup and score some coffess blindly 3 times, and we get all the statistics by the end of the competition.
The beautiful cupping surroundings in Manizales.