Alex's Coffee Adventure

Can you believe it!

I did incredibly well at the Q – I passed 18/19 of the tests and learned a boatload of knowledge. I am so grateful for my experience and the incredible instruction I received. Ultimately it’s a pass/fail course, and I failed. But by 1 cup!

Can you guess what it was?

Washed milds triangle!

1. General Knowledge Exam – passed
2. Cupping 1 – Washed Milds – passed
3. Cupping 2 – Africans – passed
4. Cupping 3 – Naturals – passed
5. Cupping 4 – Asians – passed
6. Triangle 1 – Washed Milds – failed (3 retakes)
7. Triangle 2 – Africans – passed (1 retake)
8. Triangle 3 – Naturals – passed (3 retakes)
9. Triangle 4 – Asians – passed
10. Olfactory 1 – Enzymatics – passed
11. Olfactory 2 – Sugar Browning – passed
12. Olfactory 3 – Dry Distillation – passed
13. Olfactory 4 – Aromatic Taints – passed (1 retake)
14. Sensory Skills 2 – Modality and Intensity Sort – passed
15. Sensory Skills 3 – Mixed Modality and Intensity Sorting – passed (3 retakes)
16. Green Coffee Grading – passed
17. Roasted Coffee Grading – passed
18. Roast Sample Identification – passed
19. Organic Acids Matching Pairs – passed

What a list!

I’m actually fine, because I have 18 months to retake that one test, theoretically up to 6 more times. (You’re allowed to drop in on up to 2 more Q courses, so with 3 retakes at each course that works out to 6.) So I will get my Q certificate, but just not today.

So close!

I had an incredible time, and can’t wait to tell you all about it. Today was pretty crazy: I ended up taking 8 total tests today and ultimately passed them all except that darned Washed Milds triangulation.

In the Washed Milds triangle, I got 4/6 trays right (pretty good!!), but you have to get at least 5/6 right to pass. If I had switched two cups, I would’ve passed the whole Q!

It was a bummer of a test because of the way the coffees we had in our Washed Milds set worked out. After tasting those coffees so many times, at this point I can actually describe every single coffee in that set from memory and I remember that last Washed Milds triangulation table very well. I’ve tried to make a visual representation of how the table felt for me:

Here was the problem with the table: there were two coffees that were incredibly obvious, and they were on the same 2 trays! Coffee C was absolutely terrible – it tasted like wood and oatmeal. Coffee D, meanwhile, was probably one of the best coffees I’ve had in my entire life. I could easily pick that coffee out on a cupping table, and I vividly remember the sensation it had on my mouth. You know those kiwi-strawberry Snapples? It was just like that! Deliciously sweet, slightly tangy, and super duper fruity with strong processed sugars. Also, it tasted like strawberries and kiwi!

If trays 1 and 2 had D spread across them, while 3 and 4 had C spread across them, I probably would’ve had a much easier time. Alas, we don’t always get so lucky. I was a bit bummed out when I realized my favorite coffee of the week was wasted next to the woody one on the triangle table, but I had to keep going and trudge along.

Trays 2 and 5 were pretty tough. Coffee B was a tiny bit herby, kind of like that honey green tea from Honest Tea. (I promise not all my flavor notes are different bottled iced tea beverages, but that honey green tea is just such an accurate flavor note.) Coffee E was a tiny bit fruity – maybe blueberry? raisin? – but not much so. In either case, both coffees were very clean with a slight berry-like acidity. They were tough, but I was able to pick out the right cups!

Trays 1 and 6 – well, god help you if you had to triangulate those. Honey and lavender versus honey and jasmine were the main ways I ended up thinking about them. But we’re not talking big-bar-of-lavender-soap lavender, we’re talking cup-of-coffee-that-someone-mist-one-spritz-of-lavender-scented-water-on-top lavender. If you can picture that and pick that out then all I can say is you should take the Q!

I went back and forth on Trays 1 and 6 many, many times. Each time, I’d conduct the ritual: Brain off. Deep breath. Blank mind. Lower your spoon, swirl up a spoonful, raise it. Close your eyes, reset brain. Slurp. Let the coffee tell you its story. Feel every sensation, and capture them. Swish. Roll tongue. Spit. Repeat. If being focused yesterday meant running my brain full speed at the coffee, being focused today was turning off my brain and letting the coffee talk to me. I really did practice this meditatively and became very relaxed by it, but I could only do so much.

When coffees A and F were hot, their muted acidity lead to a more balanced, rounded sweetness. A slight touch of milk chocolate, maybe, and a hint of lemon on both of them. Maybe F had a tiny bit more of a floral aftertaste, but it was very hard to tell. As they cooled, the sweetness stayed the same but the intensity of their acidities increased. Honey and jasmine became honey and …. well, who knows, honey and coffee!

I really tried my best on that triangle. I knew it was all on the line and I gave it my all, but I got trays 1 and 6 wrong. I knew it would be close but I figured I’d have a chance of getting one of the two of them. I handed in my triangle sheet and watched the instructor grade it on the edge of my tip-toes. Half a second in, I saw it and realized. Tough.

If that was the low point of the day, though, I was really pleased how everything ended up. In fact, getting the 3rd Washed Mild retake wrong today was nowhere near as disheartening for me as when I failed the same test yesterday, because this time I knew I did my best. The story I want to finish with for my Q is how far I’ve come as a coffee professional over just these few days.

Sweet (sour & salty) Memories

My first test this morning was my Sweet/Sour/Salty retake. I skipped breakfast to try to keep my mouth as clean as possible for it, but my morning tongue really messed me up. Maybe it was a mix of that and my grogginess, but I was having serious trouble with those little paper cups. 8 cups – 4 with 3 flavors, 4 with 2. After lots of switching, erasing, and general uncertainty, I handed in my first Sensory Skills (Sweet/sour/salt) retake at about 9am. Big old fail. Oh well, I had another chance. “We’ve got lots more juice,” the instructor reassured me, referring to the aqueous solutions of modalities on the test.

The Asia cupping table was next, and I was ready for it. All my classmates had arrived by then because I came in early to do my retake. We clipboard-ed up and headed in to our last cupping table. The Asia table was super interesting and very varied. There were washed coffees and wet-hulled coffees on the table of all different calibers. Tray A was a pleasant, red berry-acidity washed Asian coffee. It had a thin body and watery sweetness that reminded me of watermelons. I think I gave it around an 85. Tray B was an awful, woody, commercial grade coffee and it had a mold defect in cup 4. (One of the guys in my class is extremely sensitive to defects, so as soon as the cuppings are over I always ask him if he got the same defect cup as me. We went 4/4!) Tray B got a 77 before defect subtraction and a 67 after. Tray C was fine; it was very clean and objectionless. As it cooled, I tasted processed sugars and fruits that reminded me of maraschino cherries. 82.5. Tray D was equally objectionless, with nothing quite special. Honeyed sweetness and a balanced acidity earned it an 81.75 from me. Tray E was totally different – it was a very vegetal, earthy wet-hulled coffee. I smelled garden peas and tasted underripe bananas. Honestly, it was incredibly interesting to me and I ended up liking it enough to give it an 83.25. Tray F was absolutely exceptional, and I knew it tasted exactly like something I’d had before. After a couple of rounds of slurping, I found the flavor note. It was dragonfruit. I remembered this because my brain vividly brought up a picture of the lobby of the Little Hanoi Deluxe Hotel.

---

A very brief interlude for the weird story behind my dragonfruit note – this part is totally skippable. The Little Hanoi Deluxe Hotel is without a doubt the funniest place I have ever stayed. Russell found it when we went to Vietnam during our trip to southeast Asia in 2017 on Tripadvisor. He was astounded that the Little Hanoi had something like 300 five-star ratings, one four star rating, and zero of every other star. Even better, it was super cheap compared to big fancy hotels – something like $30/night! The pictures indicated a nice western-style hotel with big, comfy rooms, a marble welcome area, and a big breakfast buffet. Russell had decided: this would be our hotel of refuge between the many hostels of questionable quality and health code satisfaction that we stayed in in Southeast Asia. Seriously, look at their website:

Ok, of course there’s something up. No, it’s not a front for anything, I promise. It’s just clearly the fanciest only on the surface layer. For example, the bathroom: the bathroom had the most intricate jacuzzi bathtub I had ever seen. The funny thing is, the bathtub is just plopped in the middle of the floor on a little raised platform that’s glued to the ground. The walls had a very fancy wallpaper that was obviously peeling, and the wifi could either do 100 mbps speeds or 0. The staff, though, was absolutely incredible – they cared so much! They were really trying to get everything right to make it the best hotel you’d ever stayed in, and it showed and felt like it. We figured out why their Tripadvisor looked so insanely good, though:

Back to the coffee! When you arrive to the Little Hanoi Deluxe Hotel (they say the full name every time) they serve you a plate of dragonfruit! It was delicious and a wonderful respite from the sights, sounds and smells of Hanoi. That dragonfruit from Hanoi tasted so clean, sweet, and ripe that it sticks in my mind to this day, and that memory came out today at the cupping table.

---

After the Asia cupping table was the Asia triangulation. This one was pretty easy for me because there were 3 coffees that I could really easily identify: the wet-hulled green bananas, the woody commercial, and the dragonfruit! I got 6/6, and I was feeling good. We broke for lunch and I took the general knowledge exam over lunch.

General knowledge is very straightforward, and a bit of a joke. There are 100 multiple choice questions and you have to get 75 of them right. Probably 15-20 of them are about passing the Q program: how many tests you have to get right (all), how long you have to do retakes (18 months, as we’re told every day), etc. – the stuff that’s on the CQI’s FAQ webpage. The most egregious of this is the “how do you obtain your Q certificate once you pass? A) Call the office B) Await a letter C) Log into the website and download your certificate or D) Email your instructor.” According to our instructor, this question is on the exam because the CQI office was getting too annoyed with people calling to ask for their certificate, so they tell you on the test to log on to their website to download it. Stuff about the coffee itself is cursory at best, and can be reverse-engineered pretty easily from other questions on the test. E.g.: “How many minutes before brewing do you grind” is followed by “What are the steps of brewing in order.”

After lunch we did retakes. First was the washed milds retake, which I already walked you through. Then we did naturals triangle retake 1, which I also failed. (Oof, at least I didn’t fail the whole Q on that one.) At this point I was aware I hadn’t passed, so I just tried to enjoy what I had left. I got to my sweet/sour/salty retake and nailed it with a very solid passing grade. I felt great about that test and was much more confident after that.

After my sweet/sour/salty retake, I was the only one left in the facility. Everyone else had either gone home already or passed. Out of the 6 of us, 2 of us ended up passing, while 2 failed non-retakeable cupping tables, and 2 of us (including myself) failed Washed Milds triangle 3 times.

So it’s just me and the two instructors, and the only test I have left is my last shot at the naturals triangle. The instructor encouraged me to go for it, because I had nothing to lose and they had the materials and time to do it. So we did it. It was weird to have all 18 cups to myself on the triangulation table. It was also weird to be alone in a red room with the two instructors kind of staring me down. But I was happy and content with where I was at. My nose got super cleared up all of a sudden and I was ready to go.

I went around the table smelling the dry grounds and felt pretty good. Because I was by myself, I could just push the odd cup out forward if I smelled something different to indicate that it was odd to myself. After 3 rounds of sniffing, I had sorted all the odd cups out and confirmed those choices. We then brewed the coffees and I broke the crust on all 18 cups, which was kind of exhausting for my nose, but I reconfirmed my results. Finally, I took a trip around the table tasting and was even more confident in my results. I did one last double-check trip to make sure I was OK, and handed in my form.

On that last triangulation, I did not change a single answer the entire time. I took my time on the dry fragrance, found the odd cup, and became more confident on each pass.

I got 6/6!

Q, it was nice knowing you. I’ll see you again soon!

Alex