Perfect Fairway C offee Cupping (continued...) We also brew the coffee. We make shots of espresso and check for the perfect, frothy crema. We press it in a French press, bubble it in a chemex, brew a batch in a vacuum and one in a percolator, and make a pot of drip coffee. When the coffee makes its way to your home, this is how you’ll be bringing it to delicious life, and we want to ensure that it tastes nothing short of incredible. All of our coffees are closely inspected before, during, and after roasting, to make sure that all is right, every step of the way. If anything proves inconsistent or below our standards, we pull that batch. The result of all this precision, care, and obsessive attention is truly outstanding coffee, every day, at your Fairway. Fairway’s Perfect Beans Create the Perfect Cup First, Benny inspects the beans. He takes a sample from one of the big, green coffee bean-filled burlap sacks that arrive straight from the growers each week; freshness is critical. We spread them out on the table and look for gnarls or potential defects. Ideal coffee beans are smooth, shiny, and symmetrical. We pass them through a special coffee sieve to make sure they are the right size. We test for moisture—if the beans are too dry, the flavor profile may be adversely affected. We roast a small quantity of coffee, to test for flavor and quality. Then, the official cupping commences! It’s quite a precise, scientific process. Benny parcels out 8.25 grams of ground, roasted coffee into five cups…Benny’s such a pro he doesn’t need to measure. We double-check his intuition on the food scale, and find the coffee weighs in at 8.2 grams. Benny’s got the eye. He covers the grounds in hot water—not just any hot water, but 150 milliliters of water at exactly 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Inky grinds float to the top of the cup and form a sort of crust. Smell- and Taste-Tested, Fairway Approved! We get up all close and personal, sticking our noses in the cups to deduce the “wet” aromatics. Four minutes later, we gently break the crust with a spoon, stirring to release volatile aromatics. We sniff again. We then taste the sludgy stuff, sucking and slurping loudly, as serious wine people do with wine. (Retro-nasal breathing allows us to discern a more-complete array of flavor components.)
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What are we sniffing and tasting for? Our coffee must be devoid of flaws, such as off-flavors caused by old beans, poor storage, or incorrect roasting. When coffee is flawed, it emits sour flavors, bitterness, or smokiness. We’re looking for great acidity and body. Like with wine or cheese, there is an encyclopedic amount of potential notes that make coffee unique and wonderful—from citrus and berry, to chocolate and hazelnuts.