What Can You See Just by Looking

It's amazing what you can see just by looking isn't it?

Years ago my wife bought us a date night ticket for an evening coffee tasting and Coffee 101-style tour at specialty roaster in Atlanta. They walked us through the basics of coffee—where it is grown, how it is processed, and why those things matter.

Then they served us three coffees blind and challenged us to identify where each one came from.

To my surprise, I could. That evening sowed a seed.

Until then, coffee had mostly been… just coffee to me. It helped me start the day or stay up late. I appreciated it when it was easy to drink.

After that, I intrigued by the process but was mainly stunned by tasting blueberry muffin in a cup of black coffee. Not blueberry flavoring or artificial sweetener.

In many ways I am still chasing that today. I was stuck wondering...

How did they do that?

As I learned more about specialty coffee, I found suppliers describing coffees with tasting notes like strawberry, citrus, chocolate, caramel, jasmine, or peach.

I trusted those notes, but I struggled to find them in my own cup. So I bought different brewers, experimented with different methods, and kept looking.

That helped me appreciate a variety of different coffees and nuance and characteristics I would not have noticed before... but I still could not find that cup with any consistency. I doubted my pallette and I resolved that tasting notes were just marketing... but I will still looking.

Eventually my attention shifted to roasting itself. I was surprised how much freshness—and the roast itself—affected what finally reached the cup. Because that first lesson was about origin, I already understood something important.

Coffees grown in different places and processed in different ways can—and should—taste different.

I wasn’t trying to make every coffee taste the same. I wasn’t trying to force a Brazil to become an Ethiopian. I was trying to discover whether I could faithfully roast each coffee in such a way that I could find those notes in my cup.

The challenge wasn’t the coffee.

The challenge was me.

For a long time, I simply wasn’t capable of controlling the roast well enough to explore those possibilities. I even lacked one of the measurements that would eventually change the way I understood the roast.

Early on, roasting felt like controlled chaos.
Bean temperature? Environmental temperature? Rate of rise? Airflow rate?
Then development, DTR, first crack.

I could explain what those terms meant. But they were still just words. I hadn’t yet experienced them.

Every new thing I learned seemed to add another gauge to watch and another decision to make. Instead of making roasting simpler, knowledge initially made it feel more complicated.

It was overwhelming.

What has surprised me most over the last year is that the answer wasn’t learning to manage more information. I was learning to see relationships.

Environmental temperature stopped being another number on the screen. It became a way of understanding the environment the coffee was experiencing.

Bean temperature stopped being the only thing that mattered. It became one voice in a larger conversation.

The graph.

The aroma.

The color.

The sound of first crack.

The airflow.

The question:

How much energy am I carrying through this roast?

They stopped being separate things to manage.

They became one conversation.

Over time those signals started telling me one story and I could hear it and see it. Instead of reacting to numbers, I began listening to relationships.

The more I understood, the calmer I became. Ironically, I can roast with fewer adjustments now than I did when I knew far less.

The quest now continues.

I want to understand coffee from seed to cup—where it grew, how it was cultivated, how it was processed, and what those things make possible before it ever reaches my roaster.

I don’t want to copy tasting notes from a supplier onto a bag and simply assume they’re there. I want to pursue them honestly. To study the coffee. To understand it well enough that, when someone opens one of our bags, the cup tells the same story the coffee has been telling all along.

And what is "peak perfection" anyhow? Whatever that is, I think each coffee deserves its own answer.

As I continue learning with Japanese maples, I keep appreciating the same thing. Every cultivar has its own character, growth habit, strengths, and limitations. A Deshojo isn't trying to become a Seiryu with a weeping habit. It's a named cultivar because it had something that motivated a person like you or I to capture it, propagate it, and share that form with others.

In many ways, coffee is the same.

The work of roasting isn't to make every coffee resemble my favorite cup or imagine yours.

It is to understand each one well enough and what I can do to craft it into the most beautiful expression of itself. Firstly I want to be good enough to make it taste like it should... then perhaps it all that it could.

I'm still learning.

Every roast reminds me how much I don't yet know.

But perhaps that's what keeps the work so satisfying.

The greatest change over the last year hasn’t been in the coffee.

It’s been in me.

The more I’ve learned to pay attention, the less I’ve had to react.

Amazing what you can see just by looking.