On Coffee Tasting in Isolation, With Specific Reference to SSP MP Burrs. A brief musing.
I live in Greenville, Pennsylvania. It is a small town sitting a couple of miles away from the PA/OH border. If I were to drive an hour and a half south, I would reach Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If I were to drive that distance northwest, I would reach Cleveland, Ohio.
Of those two cities, I have spent much less time in Cleveland, and have yet to have a successful coffee experience there. (I am sure there are lovely cafes around there.) I prefer and have explored Pittsburgh far more, as I have family living there, and I have lots of history in that area ("heading to the 'city'" refers to a trip down I-79 to Pittsburgh.) I know of a few tasty coffee places in Pittsburgh, many of which serve a far more traditional style than I what I prefer to brew at home. Of all of the cafes in the city that I have tried, I have found precisely one that serves the style of high clarity "light roast" specialty coffee that corresponds with my niche interest: Ghost Coffee Collab on Forbes Ave, near Duquense University. I visited for the first time last year and had a lovely Panamanian gesha pourover, brewed on a Hario Switch. A few weeks ago I was in the city again and ordered a tasty shot of a Colombian sidra, and purchased a bag of anaerobic washed gesha from Cruz Loma in Ecuador. After I bought the bag, I realized that Cruz Loma is the name of the farm where the Morales family produces their coffees; their 2023 harvest of a sidra/mejorado blend roasted by Passenger Coffee stands out as one of my favorably memorable coffees of recent years. The gesha from Ghost was a lovely bag that I finished last week. I will be returning to Ghost's cafe where I purchased it on Tuesday as part of a Fresh Grounds employee field trip.
I have also made two "pilgrimages" to Passenger Coffee in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, approximately a five hour drive across the state from Greenville. These were overnight trips to visit their cafes and roastery, and to do some training and dialing with them; the first time was with some of our team at Fresh Grounds on the occasion of our partnering with Necessary Coffee as our coffee supplier, and the second was with my wife to prepare for the opening of Uncloud Coffee Bar. (Thanks to Passenger for these experiences! <3)
I am sharing all these because even as I list them out, I find myself surprised by a couple of metrics: I have been to two cafes, on four occasions, where I have enjoyed the cups of coffee served to me as being in line with my niche interest. Another way of expressing this metric to transition to the point I would like to make: I have experienced a total of four occasions where I have encountered a broader community of experienced specialty coffee brewers who have been able to brew the types of coffee that I am specifically passionate about, and the types of cups they produce. Even these cups, as lovely as they were, were not the way I would have brewed them at home or in my business; one of the beautiful things about specialty coffee is the amount of variance individuals can take in their methodology to achieve different goals in their cup profile. The opportunities I have to "share notes" on brewing with these folks is minimal, save some of the training sessions at Passenger's lab.
Compare this metric to the wealth of opportunities afforded to somebody who is local to the Bae Area Coffee Club in California, or Hyunah Coffee Club in New York City. Or consider even what it would be like to be geographically more local to or even employed by a place like Ghost Coffee Collab or Passenger Coffee; in this instance, the opportunities to learn about specialty coffee would be more focused/less varied than being exposed to a community of enthusiasts, but still a more helpful framework for support and education than no community at all.
The absence of this community for an aspiring enthusiast is likely to be supplanted by presence in an online community of some kind; for me, this has been most notably the Discord server that bears the name of Brian Quan, and to a lesser extent the Espresso Aficianados (EAF) server. For others, it might be Facebook groups centered around an aspect of coffee brewing, or perhaps a forum like Home-Barista. While these communities have been of amazing use to me over the past years (I pray that I can be as helpful to them as they have been to me), remote communities have apparent limitations.
The obvious concern surrounding brewing coffee in a relatively vacuous space (geographically speaking), especially in professional settings, is that of calibration. Being able to taste the same cup of coffee and develop a shared vocabulary for describing the experience is an invaluable skill for a team trying to reach a certain goal in their brewing program, and a higher degree of precision in such a calibration (acquired through practice and prolonged experience/rapport with one another) has the potential to lead to a higher success rate. This holds true for home enthusiasts who have varied preferences and goals but still desire to understand what impact different variables have on the taste of their brews. Having a shared vocabulary with which to dialogue about their experiences can help each individual reach their own goals.
However, I'd like to call attention to another concern, closely related to calibration, that comes with distance from an established, geographically united coffee community: expectation. This can be especially bewitching to beginners in specialty coffee, who it can catch unaware of the gap. The question is simple: what do I expect my coffee to taste like, given a certain set of parameters? Words like "clarity," "sweetness", "floral", "hollow", "astringent" are difficult to actually define without being able to taste the exact same source across all parties in the conversation, and these words can even carry different meanings when discussing the multifaceted world of coffee brewing as it relates to beans, roasts, grinding, water chemistry, brewing methods & techniques, etc. Intuition is incredibly helpful for determining the meaning of these words in any given context, but it is also limited and sometimes a hindrance to reaching consensus about a given term when an individual assumes that it refers to a sensation far removed from what the original intention of the word. The confusion around "expectation" is exacerbated when a variable also introduces more taste factors than the one that is described, and reaches a point of absurdity when the marketing departments of various coffees and pieces of equipment set their hands on it.
A personal example is that of the infamous 64mm SSP Multipurpose (MP) burrs. For a few years, these burrs, especially when housed in the budget flat-burr Fellow Ode grinder, were touted as a high point for a coffee enthusiast without access to a budget for high-end (at the time, mainly commercial-grade) equipment. Some influencers touted the Ode/SSP MP combo as being their favorite grinding solution short of an EK43 commercial grinder, while others stated plainly that they thought the MP burrs improved the coffee but remained skeptical that it was worth the $180USD markup over the stock burrs. I, too, bought into this trend as my first clarity-forward grinder at home, near the start of my experience with specialty coffee.
Unlike several years ago, it is now relatively common knowledge among enthusiasts that the SSP MP 64mm burrs are notoriously unforgiving, and that the way they present clarity and acidity in the cup can easily lead to harshness and astringency in the cup if there are problems with the roast or the brew. Using them effectively requires a level of knowledge and brewing experience that most beginners are simply not able to attain, especially in without the hands-on guidance from somebody more experienced in coffee brewing.
My experience during this time was a difficult one. Based on how I understood the testimony surrounding the burrs (I did as much independent research as I could beforehand), I expected them to simply make my coffee taste better. When I tasted the harsh, astringent brews, I struggled to imagine what I was doing wrong. With a fine tooth comb, I examined my water, coffee storage methods, coffee drippers and recipes; I even attempted to align the burrs with the foil/shimming method on multiple occasions, convinced from a process elimination that the problem lay in poor performance from the burrs. Although my understanding and techniques definitely benefited from much of my labor in this period, I still remained frustrated and discouraged that it felt like I couldn't brew a good cup of coffee.
My confidence shaken, I began to question whether I had some kind of indefinable quality about myself that made me suck at brewing. Or, as I heard somewhere that some people might not enjoy clarity-forward coffee, perhaps I just had set my expectations that this style of coffee tasted great, when in reality, it wasn't. In this period (which I am grateful to have persevered through), the 1% of cups from these burrs that I actually enjoyed were the only things that suggested to me that it was worth it to keep trying.
Likely over a year since I purchased them, I heard for the first time a mention of the difficult nature of the SSP MP burrs on a stream by Brian Quan, where he casually mentioned them as "punishing", "unforgiving", and "harsh." I almost cried.
I've come a long way on my specialty coffee journey since then, and I've learned much about coffee and how to brew it. My equipment set-up is much more expensive now than that humble Fellow Ode on my kitchen counter, and I'm far more confident in my knowledge of brewing and the average cup that I produce. (In fact, part of me wishes to acquire another set of my long-ago sold 64 MP burrs, just to test myself against their particularities.) But there is still a gap, and an inherent fact that the progress I make as a brewer is slowed by my lack of a physical "coffee community." Frankly, this is not something I can resolve by my own volition; my circumstances and family have grounded me here in my small town, for now, and no community will appear here without the organic growth of interest in specialty coffee. All I can do right now to rely on my own taste and my intuition and remote community to interpret it, and keep brewing as many beautiful coffees as I can and share them with those around me. Perhaps, some day, the foundation for a local coffee "club" will exist in this place, where passion for specialty coffee can flourish in more people than just myself.
There's not much of a "point" to this post, other than my musings on my present situation. Hopefully this is an encouragement to any readers who find themselves similarly placed in relation to their interests and life situations. Perhaps I feel a slight sense of shame or embarrassment for attempting to pursue a career in this type of coffee while living in a relative vacuum; it was slightly odd to try to describe the ambitions of Uncloud Coffee Bar as it existed in rural Pennsylvania to people who are used to the innovative coffee business of Southern California or New York City.
As a final note, one perk of being this isolated from people unfamiliar with the coffees I specialize in (aside from often being viewed as a "nerd" at best or an "elitist" at worst) is the pleasure of serving somebody their first cup of specialty coffee. Whether it be through the cupping workshops I've facilitated at Fresh Grounds, the pour-overs I've brewed for Uncloud Coffee customers, or the private cups brewed for friends and family, there's a beautiful moment for many people when they realize "I didn't know coffee could taste like that!" As always, I'm grateful for all things.