Today was the hardest day of the Q yet, and likely the hardest of the week. I had absolute jitters all day. The last time I was this nervous for a test was my SATs in high school. There are too many details from today to tell you all and I’m absolutely beat, so this won’t be the most in-depth blog post you’ll read. But I have some great news – I’m halfway there!
Here’s what happened today, although this morning’s cupping feels at least two weeks away from right now: Washed Milds Cupping Exam, Washed Milds Triangulation Exam, Africans Cupping Exam, Africans Triangulation Exam, Le Nez Dry Distillation and Aromatic Taints exam, Roast Identification Exam, and a Le Nez retake. 8 tests in total for the day. Good news – they went great! I passed both the Washed Milds and the Africans cupping, which is a huge win because you can’t retake cuppings this week, passed the Roast ID, and passed both of the Le Nez tests (although the Taints took me 2 tries). I didn’t pass the triangulations for the Washed Milds or the Africans, but that’s okay because I have the chance for up to two more retakes of both of them this week. Here’s where we stand:
- General Knowledge Exam
- Cupping 1 – Washed Milds – passed
- Cupping 2 – Africans – passed
- Cupping 3 – Naturals
- Cupping 4 – Asians
- Triangle 1 – Washed Milds – 2 retakes remaining
- Triangle 2 – Africans – 2 retakes remaining
- Triangle 3 – Naturals
- Triangle 4 – Asians
- Olfactory 1 – Enzymatics – passed
- Olfactory 2 – Sugar Browning – passed
- Olfactory 3 – Dry Distillation – passed
- Olfactory 4 – Aromatic Taints – passed (1 retake)
- Sensory Skills 2 – Modality and Intensity Sort – passed
- Sensory Skills 3 – Mixed Modality and Intensity Sorting
- Green Coffee Grading – passed
- Roasted Coffee Grading – passed
- Roast Sample Identification – passed
- Organic Acids Matching Pairs
I haven’t failed!! I was absolutely terrified of the Washed Milds cupping this morning, because if I missed a defect I was done. Missing a defect counts as failing the test, and because you can’t retake the cuppings this week missing a defect means you can’t pass the Q this week. You get up to 18 months to retake tests and can attend up to 2 more Q’s after this for retakes, but jeez does that sound like a lot of work or what.
While a week ago today I was literally still asleep at 9:25am, today at 9:25 I was standing at a grading table nervously tallying up my scoresheet for the washed milds. It quickly became apparent to me that my scores were way too high – “no chance that’s an 85-point coffee, Alex! This is it, your Q is over” shouted my internal monologue. I vividly recall overheating from stress at that point, basically certain that I’d failed. “All you could say about that coffee was honeyed sweetness and tea-like tanins. That’s barely specialty grade, if you ask me.” The trouble is, you tally up your scores from each individual attribute at the end of your cupping, so unless your mental math is quick it’s hard to know what your final score is until the end, even if you have an overall idea of the coffee.
This is really a big problem, because on first slurp I’ll think “this coffee is worth 83 points, max.” But when I start filling out the Aftertaste box, I think, “you know, it did go down quite pleasantly. 8.25.” (All 8’s in attributes yields 86 points, because of 30 points for Uniformity/Clean Cup/Sweetness in defect-free coffee and 7 scored categories.) Then I hit the Acidity box and think, “you know, actually, it’s got some nice rounded citrus, maybe tangerine-like. 8.” Then I’ll finish up the cupping form and realize: oh crap! there I go at 85 points.
So what do I do next? Overcorrect, as expected! We hit the Africans table and all I can think is “it has to earn the 8’s don’t give them for free.” I go around giving 7.5’s for plum and grapefruit notes, thinking, “stop overscoring, damnit!” Of course, I end up with a bunch of 82 point coffees by the end. I go back and taste them on a last round and realize, “this is the best coffee I’ve tasted all week. How does it only have 84.5 points.”
This is all to say, I was a nervous wreck. We hit 11am and I am absolutely frazzled. During lunch, the instructor says we can talk about our Washed Milds cupping forms with him and do a bit of one-on-one debrief. He goes into the other room with the cupping sheets, and one of my classmates eagerly follows. The classmate comes out two minutes later with the kind of expression I don’t really know how to describe, but found the perfect gif for:
Ok, I guess? Another one heads in. I think that I’ll go next, because I kind of want to just know. So I camp out by the door, finishing up my lunch. 5 minutes pass with the other student in and I get worried – what’s going on? 10, 15 minutes pass and I think that someone must have passed out. 16 minutes after heading in, the next classmate comes out, clearly disappointed. I feel bad and don’t want to catch any bad vibes, so I let someone else skip ahead.
Finally, it’s my turn.
“Alex K., Alex K., OK, let’s find yours.”
What was I thinking. I don’t belong here. I know I failed.
“Here we are.”
I’ll just take the L now. Get it over with.
“Um, let’s see. Yes, ok, yeah. Ok!”
Oh man. He found the mistake. Here it comes.
“Proper use of form, calibrated. Ok!”
What?
“What?”
“Looks like you’re all good,” Todd assures me with his go-to avuncular smirk.
“Well, um Ok! Alright! T-Thanks!”
What?
So that was that! I was deeply confused, but felt a bit better. We hit the olfactory tests from Le Nez du Cafe, and I figured it would be a bit of a pick-me-up, because I’m pretty good at Le Nez. I started on the Dry Distillation table, which I think is the hardest because so many of the scents are ill-defined. Blackcurrant, for example, smells nothing like blackcurrants: to me, it’s a bit winey and a bit sugary, but not fruity. Indeed, it was blackcurrant on the exam table today that tripped up a bunch of my fellow students. Perhaps because of my newfound confidence, I picked the blackcurrant vial out and passed the Dry Distillation round. Blackcurrant is kind a meme for me, because when I was learning the vials I thought that every vial I couldn’t recognize was blackcurrant, yet I never correctly called blackcurrant out. Anna sat with me for hours two weekends ago as I figured out the smell, so we can all thank her for today’s blog post. (Fun tidbit of a story: blackcurrant became such an in-joke between me and Anna that when I uploaded Monday’s blog post, she noticed I forgot to list blackcurrant and called it out in the comments! I’ve since edited it.)
Lest I get too happy, though, I quickly proceeded to fail the Aromatic Taints test for Le Nez. But seriously, who is every going to correctly distinguish between No.s 20, 35, and 36 – leather, medicinal, and rubber, respectively. Like come on, they’re the exact same vial!! Not to say they’re the exact same smell in real life; this is the supremely pretentious Le Nez du Cafe, after all. Luckily, we had enough time left in the day for a retake of Le Nez, and the medicinal smell didn’t come up this time, so I passed. 4/4 olfactory tests down!
Finally, we had the Roast Sample ID test. I was very nervous for this one (noticing a trend?) because I got 0/3 correct in the practice round and was flailing during the practice triangulation. Maybe it was the red light room and maybe it was the residual high from not failing the Q yet, but it was probably the fact that my mouth has never been more sensitive than it was at 3pm today that got me going. When we hit the Roast Sample ID triangles, I was in the groove.
I explained the Roast Sample ID test in “Q Day 2,” but I’ll do a quick recap. In the test, you are presented with the same coffee roasted 4 different ways. The coffee is either under-roasted, over-roasted, baked, or “spec,” meaning correctly roasted. The test itself is another triangulation. There are 6 trays, each containing 3 cups, and 1 of the 3 cups is different from the other 2. The odd one out is not always the defect, though: sometimes you’ll have 2 baked, 1 spec, or 1 spec, 2 under, meaning the odd cup out is the spec. Every tray has at least 1 spec coffee, though, so you’re not comparing over-roasted to baked. On the answer key, you are to identify which of the 3 cups is the odd cup out and write the roast degree of the odd cup out.
In Roast Sample ID, you don’t get to smell the dry fragrance or wet aroma of the coffee, because that would give it away too easily. You’re invited into the “red room” (only red lights so that you can’t perceive relative color differences) after the cups have been brewed and skimmed, so all you have is your tongue.
I stepped up to the table, and boom, I was off. My strategy for completing triangulations is putting a series of X’s next to the line that I think is the odd cup out, each after a different pass. Big X’s means “I am very confident this time” whereas little X’s or even multiple X’s on different lines means “it’s probably this one or might be one of these two.” (I wish I could show you a picture but we don’t get to keep our answer keys.) First tray three slurps, giant X next to cup 2. It has a super strong acidity that clearly differentiates it. Then I had to figure out whether this acidity is what the coffee actually tastes like or if it’s the under-roasted cup. (A baked roast will diminish the acidity such that spec:baked ~ under:spec.) Next tray, cup 1 is clearly baked. I taste bread and cardboard. Cup 2 – ok? Cup 3, yeah, that’s baked. Ok. Cup 2 is spec, odd one out. Go back to tray one – is cup 2 tray 1 more acidic than cup 2 tray 2? Yes? Ok, cup 2 tray 1 under. Check with tray 2? Oh yeah. Definitely. Around I go, with six slurps max per tray. Tray 5, wow, that is SMOKEY – over roasted for sure.
I look down at the sheet and see the biggest X’s I’ve ever written during a triangulation. How am I this confident? I must’ve gotten it wrong. I do another pass, and, yeah, no, OK…
So I handed the sheet in way early. For this one, it’s just yes or no, so the instructor can grade it very quickly. A couple of check marks here, yeah, looks good. Good job, you passed!
You know those moments when all the anticipation makes the success so much better? This was definitely one of those. It was the last test of the day, so I was absolutely thrilled. (I’ve been reading about Britain because of Trump’s state visit, and I think the more accurate vocabulary for this moment is probably “chuffed to bits,” but I don’t think I can pull that off with a straight face.) I rushed out of the examination room, pumped my fists in the air and walked around outside. No one was around, so my celebration was a bit underwhelming, as well as probably a bit preemptive, but hey – I didn’t fail the Q yet!
So all in all, I’m feeling good. Today was an absolute rollercoaster of a day, and I have a long way to go before I can really get excited, but I’m on the right track. Alex the Q Grader, can you imagine? Don’t jinx it!
One last fun story: by the end of the day, our mouths were shot. The classmate next to me bit into a green apple as the instructors cleaned up from Roast Sample ID and laughed. I asked what was up. He responded “I have no sense of taste left. This literally tastes like iceberg lettuce.” I’m with you there, man.
Signing off from another day at the Q. Wish me luck for tomorrow!
Alex
Alex's Coffee Adventure 