Susan Jackson

Learning the basics of gourmet beans

Amy Thieeault wears a small, sparkly stud in her nose and her blond hair cropped short. Her welcoming smile is enough to ward off any stress as she deftly assembles a line of breakfast burritos behind the counter at True Grounds, the coffee and sandwich shop she and Rhett Richard opened in Somerville’s Ball Square in 2004. The Saturday morning crowd is lively—a group of women tuck themselves into a table in the front window, loudly sharing stories and laughter; students in sweats clutch laptops and textbooks as they crane their necks, looking for an empty table in every corner of the tiny maroon-walled seating area; middle-aged adults relax with newspapers. Amidst the tribal masks, landscape photographs, and coffee kitsch lining the walls, everyone sips his or her caffeine of choice from one of True Grounds’ colorful, mismatched ceramic mugs. Thieeault may not be able to tell you where all her customers have come from on any given day, but she can tell you where their coffee did—each and every cup.

True Grounds exclusively serves Terroir Select Coffee, a gourmet brand based in Acton, Massachusetts, that believes in a transparent approach to the business of acquiring and roasting coffees. The company sells only single-origin varieties, meaning Terroir knows that all the beans in a batch came from the same place, as well as how they were grown, and by whom. “The single origin is a huge draw,” says Thieeault. “We’ve had great conversations with our customers who are psyched to have George in the area.” The George she speaks of is George Howell, owner of Terroir Select and legend in the world of specialty coffee.

Terroir, the French word that refers to the characteristics the geography of an area imparts on wine, is a fitting name for the company and its coffee values. Thieeault knows, for example, that the dark roast she is serving this month came from the Matalapa farm outside El Salvador’s southwestern city of La Libertad. If she visited Terroir Select’s website, she could also find out that the 14-acres of virgin tropical forest that makes up the farm is owned and operated by Vickie Ann Dalton de Díaz, whose great grandmother began the operation in the late 1800s.

Try getting that from someone behind the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts.

This origin-specific information may seem superfluous to many, but to the coffee elite, it can be essential for enjoyment. It lets them know what to expect in terms of flavor, body, and other characteristics. These people are on a higher level of loving coffee, and if you’re not in their club, they can spot you like a freezer bag full of Folgers Crystals. If you want to tread on their turf, you’ll need to know some coffee basics.

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Before the Starbucks boom in the late 1990s, coffee was not widely seen in the United States as a beverage of status. Tasters Choice and the bottomless cup at the local greasy spoon fueled early risers and all-night study sessions. Independent coffee shops existed, but harbored hip people who spoke a language foreign to just-add-water, instant drinkers. They used words like cappuccino and latté. They put on open mic nights and sold vegan biscotti. In those days, you avoided the potential embarrassment of not knowing how to properly order a cup by avoiding these places.

But now, these places are everywhere. Thanks to the proliferation of that green circle and crowned mermaid, ordinary people are fluent in such Starbuck-ified Italian units of liquid measure as tall, grande, and venti.

Coffee is not simple anymore. For someone who doesn’t drink a lot of it, a trip to Starbucks can be a nightmare. Choosing from the extensive drink menu and worrying about ordering correctly can induce sweating, especially when everyone else in line potentially is a coffee elitist, waiting to flex his or her expert ordering muscles while you stumble over where to correctly insert the word “iced” into your beverage request.

Gourmet chains have given the masses a basic education in specialty coffee—it seems nearly everyone has a favorite number of espresso shots—and it’s difficult to tell the coffee fanatic from the poseur. So does that guy ahead of you who just ordered the Breakfast Blend with such authority really know what is in it? Or has seeing pictures of Britney Spears’ daily Frappuccino © runs subliminally spurred him to come in? Maybe that woman in the power suit really needs a gallon of high-test coffee to push her through an important M&A meeting, or perhaps she believes the cup complements her pencil skirt and completes her air of authority. What about the pack of teenage girls giggling behind you? Do the milkshake-cum-coffee beverages they are undoubtedly about to order make them bona fide coffee connoisseurs? You definitely can’t order the safety drink—a hot chocolate—with this group around. They’ll know you’re a fake. Plus you’ll probably say “small” instead of “tall” and really make the green-aproned baristas snicker at you behind that noisy machine that spits out steam and pretentiousness.

Knowledge of the Starbucks menu alone, though, doesn’t qualify your line-mates for PhDs in coffee. “The green giant sells more milk than they do coffee,” says John Wheir, who has been a professional roaster with major companies International Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and Allegro Coffee (coffee supplier for Whole Foods). “I appreciate their effort to educate the public about specialty coffee, but they have become the McDonald’s of coffee.”

So where to turn for tutelage if not to the giant? Websites, online communities, and podcasts dedicated to the art of loving coffee can be places to build an understanding without risking the scrutiny of the coffee shop snob (or wannabe snob). Sweet Maria’s, Coffee Geek, and Coffee Review are just a few. The Snob Free Coffee podcast is particularly aware of the highbrow coffee clique. Its welcoming message states, “If you haven’t got it by now—we hate coffee snobs. It’s not that we don’t agree that a combination of good machinery and good technique can produce great coffee. But that doesn’t mean that looking down at people who don’t know their macchiato from their ristretto is called for.”

When it is your time to bravely explore the world of coffee elitism, start with something widely consumed that you are probably already familiar with—blended coffee.

Blends can help mediocre coffees become unique flavor experiences. Like wine grapes, and plant life in general, coffee beans take on different flavors and characteristics depending on where, how, and when they are grown. Because of differences in weather, soil, and countless other factors, the tasting notes for South Australia’s Penfolds 2005 Koonunga Hill Shiraz indicate that the wine has hints of licorice, while the 2003 vintage does not. Similarly, a farm may yield coffee crops of varying quality from year to year. The beans used in a blended coffee may come from a variety of different farms, regions, or countries and work together to compensate for individual weaknesses or inconsistencies—it’s teamwork in beverage form.

With blends, roasters must begin with the end result in mind and know what the farmer’s intentions were when producing the beans. Altitude and position of mountain slope are among several hundred other microclimatic conditions that contribute to the unique flavor of an origin the roaster is trying to bring out. “To determine the desired end taste profile of a blend, a master roaster may have a palate of berries from Ethiopia’s Harrar region, the earthiness of freshly picked mushrooms in a Sulawesi, or the rich black currant one might encounter in the perfect Kenya AA,” says Wheir, who speaks as if he is a priest, and coffee is his religion.

Blends can combine beans of a lesser quality with something great, but coffee experts know that blends can also mask the superior qualities some exemplary beans possess. Enter single-origin coffee. The belief is that fine single-origin coffees, like fine wines, should not be blended, but rather allowed to stand alone as complete statements. This approach showcases superior beans and gives kudos to the farmers responsible for their cultivation. Properly incentivised, the single-origin market encourages farmers to strive for quality and recognition unattainable when producing for anonymous blends. Most notably, a competition called the Cup of Excellence (CoE), known as the Oscar’s© of coffee, determines a country’s absolute best single-origin offerings for a particular year through a stringent selection process. The winning lots are sold via a worldwide Internet auction to the highest bidder. Eighty-five percent of the fetching price goes directly to the farmer. “Winning the Cup of Excellence auction is a life-changing event for these farmers,” says Jerry O’Hare, customer service manager for Terroir Select, which purchases CoE lots. On the commodities market, coffee is sold for between 60 and 80 cents per pound. Through the CoE, the coffee sells from 5 to 50 dollars per pound.

Identifying origin and paying super-premium prices may seem outlandish in a world of generally accepted anonymous coffee, but it is exactly like knowing the region and vineyard of a particular wine. Even for those who are not sommeliers, hearing the names of regions like Napa Valley or Bordeaux conjure up associations about the quality and taste of a wine. Similarly, a coffee fanatic would expect that beans from Brazil would yield a heavy-bodied brew.

“Coffee really hits your palette in different ways,” says Maureen Keleher, a full-time coffee lover and part-time barista in an independent shop. “Sumatra really hits the back of your throat—it tastes like dirt.” Like many serious drinkers, Keleher has strong opinions about her beans, but she didn’t always. During the beginning of the Starbucks boom, she lived in San Diego and worked for the corporate giant for 4 years. Although she grew up in an instant-coffee household, she unlocked the mysteries of specialty coffee through patience and tasting. “My favorites tend to be single origins, although blends can be excellent depending on where they are from,” says Keleher.

There is a complex relationship between blending rituals and the terroir-specific single-origin estate coffee, but there isn’t necessarily a question of superiority. “Each coffee has a combination that must be unlocked,” says Wheir. “Once unlocked, a coffee’s fullest potential may be as a single-origin offering, or it may be as a portion of a fine blend. The coffee determines its own destiny. . .our greatest responsibility as roasters and buyers is to unlock that coffee’s potential. That may mean a lightly handed roast or a heavier handed roast—a blend or a single origin.”

Wheir’s longish hair falls into his eyes as he describes the roasting process, drawing crude pictures representing a coffee bean as it cracks and expands with the increasing temperature inside the roasting machine. “The coffee starts out green; it’s the seed of a coffee cherry actually, not a bean at all,” he says. “As the roasting occurs, the tiny green bean transforms into the rich brown bean people are familiar with.”

Just how brown those beans get can be just as important to the final cup of coffee as the conditions in which the beans are grown. Many believe that the darker the roast, the better the flavor, quality, and higher the caffeine-level of the coffee. In actuality, dark roasts can destroy the subtle flavors of a fine coffee and generally contain less caffeine than a lighter roast. Starbucks is known for its dark roasts and is often criticized for serving brews that taste burnt. With high-quality single-origin coffees especially, a lighter roast is the best approach to fully enjoy the characteristics of the coffee and its region. Unless a very talented roaster is at the controls, the longer and darker a roast goes, the more the beans can discard their own individual flavors and take on the flavors of the roasting process itself, becoming bitter and smoky. Improperly dark roasting particularly good beans is like charring a premium cut of filet mignon down to a dried-out cube—a waste.

Terroir Select coffee strongly believes in utilizing the light roast to impart nuanced flavors. Oddly though, at True Grounds, Thieeault offers that El Salvadorian dark roast mentioned earlier. “A couple years ago we had a strong following of the dark roast and French roast fans, so we had to push George into doing a French roast for us,” says Thieeault. Surprisingly, Terroir Select was happy to accommodate despite their typical adamancy about light roasting. “George has such a wonderful palate that he can recognize the characteristics in a coffee that would allow its flavor profile to blossom in a dark roast,” says Wheir.

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Dark roasts are bad? Dark roasts are good when done right? Single-origin coffee is the best, but blends are great too? If all this coffee talk has only succeeded in making specialty coffee seem more unattainable, don’t fret. Opinions on the subject vary, but with time and patience, you can develop an understanding of coffee, and a sense of coffee-elitism all your own. Practicing at home may be more economical though. Wheir points out that even though prices can top $16 per pound for specialty coffee, you’re still only spending less than 75 cents a cup.

In the meantime, if you want to play the part of informed coffee elitist among the masses of those in the know, or pretending to be, while in line at the gourmet coffee shop, ask the barista for a black, single-origin Costa Rica La Minita Estate and watch Mr. Iced Grande Caramel Macchiato behind you quiver. He’s probably got a bag of Folgers in his freezer anyway.