How the belief in a supposed skill made me miss out on great coffees

There’s a little story I started telling myself after I had been buying coffee for just a couple of years, and it went like this:

I can taste green coffee through the roast.

What does this even mean? It means that I believed I could accurately evaluate a coffee’s qualities and score regardless of how poorly it was roasted, provided it wasn’t charred beyond recognition. It means that I believed the score I gave the sample wouldn’t change if I cupped a different roast of the same green.

The story served me well; it certainly helped me avoid buying bad coffees. But the story is a lie, and I’m sure it made me miss out on a great deal of great coffees.

First, let’s explore why I told myself this lie. To be an effective buyer of green coffee, you have to build a deep understanding of what factors cause green coffee to taste as it does. You learn about terroir, soil, varieties, harvest, processing, and drying above all others. You grow an intuition for how changes in these crucial steps play a part in the samples you’re cupping.

On a given table of samples, you can reasonably assume that they were all roasted similarly enough that roast is not a variable. All of those other details of the green coffee are what make up the differences in the cup.

But there’s more than that. Many green coffee buyers travel all over the world tasting coffee. Often, they have little or no control over how samples are roasted, even if they fully appreciate the impact of roasting on a cup’s score.

I’m not alone in feeling this way. I can count on one hand the number of green buyers who believe that roast is important in their sensory evaluation of a green coffee. I would need several hands to count the number of coffee buyers who believe they cup through roast. 

Recently, I cupped a Rwandan sample provided by Atlas while looking for offerings for Facsimile. Here are my raw cupping notes:

83.00

fragrance/ aroma: vegetal, chocolate?, molasses

liquor: unsweet, vegetal, raisin, nice body, sweet + bright when hot, still vegetal as cools

Not sure if you caught this, but I wrote “vegetal” three times and wrote the coffee off completely. Also note that I do not mention the roast at all. There was nothing obviously wrong with the roast during my evaluation.

But Scott Rao, who closely monitors the ROR curves of all the coffees I received, reached out when he saw my score. He pointed out that, due to no error of the person sample roasting, the reliable Mark Benedetto, there had been an issue with the roast.

Fortunately, the good people at Atlas were willing to indulge a little experiment, and sent me more of the sample, despite my explanation that I’d be unlikely to purchase the coffee. (Thank you, Chris Davidson!) A new sample, properly executed, arrived on my table:

86.00

fragrance/ aroma: orange, caramelized sugar, raisin

liquor: chocolate, orange, golden raisin

A three-point difference for this experienced cupper because of roast? This experience has completely changed my understanding of green-coffee evaluation.

For one, it’s why we decided that all Facsimile products include a roasted sample. We had been considering offering a green-only version, but reconsidered after realizing that even the most skilled and experienced sample roasters using the best equipment can make a mistake, especially in their first batch of a new coffee.

Two, I accept that if I don’t like a sample, it might be the roast, not the green.

Three, you will no longer hear me say that I cup through roast. I don’t believe that anyone else can either. If anything, this lie held me back from a deeper understanding of when a roast is not appropriate for green coffee evaluation.

Finally, it has helped me considerably to have consistent ROR curves in my sample roasts. Great roasting should not be exclusive to production roasting.