You all know the game we played in the lab last last month and the song that goes with it: it's the simple act of picking the one item in a group that is different. In the coffee world we call this type of tasting challenge "Triangulation" and there are both national and world wide competitions to determine who can best identify the odd one out.
Photos by Devorah Freudiger, Gimme! Coffee
To run this triangulation cupping we set up nine sets of three bowls, in each set two of the coffees are the same and one is different. Sometimes picking the odd one out is easy: I'm sure that if I put a naturally processed coffee in a group with two washed ones every single one of you reading this (coffee professional or not) would be able to pick it out.
However, asking you to pick out the different one from a pairing of two coffees from the same region, that are the same varietal and processed the same way is where things get difficult. And in our lab difficult means interesting.
During a Cup Tasting Championship cuppers are judged by the number of correct samples identified. If there is a tie between competitors the one who got the most right in the least amount of time is named the winner. We didn't set a timer for our cupping exercise, it was all for fun and to test ourselves.
We also decided to go through the entire cupping process, which means we got to sniff the dry aroma of the coffee. This gave us a heads up on which one was different, although we also used our sense of taste and judged the coffees aftertaste and mouthfeel. The cup that was not identical to the other two was marked on the bottom with black dot. This way we knew when we'd chosen the correct one.
As I said, some of the trios were easy, some were hard. The most interesting thing we found during our cupping was that a few of the samples had the same coffees, but the identical pairs were inverted, and that changed how we perceived them. One cup of Mocha Java was easier to pick out from from two cups of Piccolo Mondo than it was to pick out one cup of Piccolo Mondo from two Mocha Javas.
This was a great exercise for us to reconnect with the coffee we taste every day. We had to pay careful attention to how they smelled, tasted and felt in our mouths.
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