Alex's Coffee Adventure

The title says it all, but I did it! I passed the Q Arabica Grader!

It’s been an incredible journey, so I think it’s time for an update to our list:

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 – PASSED (4 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 rollercoaster. I’ll get my certificate online in a few days, but as of now I am officially a Q Arabica Grader!

How it Went Down

I didn’t post yesterday, so there’s a bit of a story to today’s test. After my Q in Williamsburg, VA from June 3-9, I looked for other Q classes this summer to retake the washed milds triangle. Incredibly, I found that there are usually about 1 or 2 classes every year in the entire country of Colombia, and this year’s class happened to be on the weekend I’d be in Bogotá! I figured it’d be best to take the retake while I was still “fresh” even though you have a full 18 months to retake it, so I jumped at the chance.

The Q was held at Catación Pública, which is an awesome specialty café in the very hip Usaqúen neighborhood of Bogotá. I contacted them when I got to Bogotá to ask about their availability and they told me I could attend. That’s when I started getting nervous.

I went to Catación Pública last week to make sure everything was set in person. I’d have to move my flight back 2 days, but the change fee was a very pleasing $13, which worked for me! One of the things I pushed for pretty hard was to get to do a practice round with them before my official retake. My instructor in Virginia has one of the laxest retake policies in the world: if you take the original test with him, he lets you retake any part of it for free (space contingent) and will let you come to the practice test before it. Most places aren’t like this, and Catación Pública was not so into this policy.

The compromise we settled on was me getting to attend a practice triangulation the day before, although it was for Asian coffees instead of the dreaded Washed Milds. This worked out OK for me, and gave me a 1-day runway to prep myself for the real test.

Yesterday’s practice was at a grueling 9am, and I needed to get all ready before the test. When I took the Q in Virginia, I brushed my teeth without toothpaste in the morning (brushed extra in the afternoon/night to make up for this) and held off on any substantial breakfasts so that my palate would be untainted going into the testing days. This turned out to be a poor strategy because my mouth would still be dry and not really “warmed up” for tasting, so yesterday I tried a new tactic.

Yesterday, I woke up at 7am, showered, and fully brushed my teeth. Then I went to a nearby coffee shop and had a generous breakfast of arepas, orange juice, 2 cups of coffee, and water – in that order. The idea was to try to fully rid my mouth of toothpaste (OJ helps with that), wake up my tastebuds (arepas), start to calibrate my mouth to coffee (the coffee), then clean it all out with lots of water. This strategy ended up working great, and when I got to the practice triangulation yesterday my mouth was all ready to go.

Today, I repeated that strategy except with considerably more anxiety.

I showed up for the 11am test at 10:45, and to my dismay they had barely started the cupping test that preceded it. The cupping took about an hour, then cleanup and a break pushed back the test I was there for to about 12:10. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except I was sitting outside the exam room (which has a big glass wall) nervously watching them all taste the coffees I was about to triangulate for an hour and a half. It was time for my secret weapon: my Johnny Cash playlist.

Johnny Cash, as he has many times, calmed my nerves and got me focused. When they turned on the red lights (so that you can’t see differences in the coffees), closed the shade, and called us in, I was ready to go.

Catación Pública does the Q very similarly to where I took it in VA, with one small difference:

At Catación Pública, they don’t leave the lids on the cups when you’re smelling the dry coffee grounds. This isn’t a huge deal, but it lets the fragrance waft away rather quickly and makes it (in my opinion) a bit more difficult to isolate and smell each cup. So that was problem #1.

Problem #2 was much more significant: a very troublesome test taker. At the Q, you get people with all ranges of experience, and it isn’t always helpful to have a 10-year industry professional in your class. At Catación Pública, one of the 5 people on my triangulation table fit this mold pretty well, and he kept doing one thing (likely out of habit) that drove me crazy. He wouldn’t rinse his spoon!

There are so many problems with this. The most obvious is that it’s just gross: he went from one cup to the next sipping each cup and dipping his saliva and residue into the next cup. The much more potent problem concerns the fact that this is a triangulation, which means cross contamination will make the test impossible!! I was very peeved by this guy and it significantly distracted me during the test. I managed to block him out a bit though and try to just focus on the coffees.

The Most Stressful X Mark

As I said before, I fill out triangulation sheets with a series of X’s that help me narrow down which senses are telling me which coffee is different. One of the biggest pieces of advice you’ll get from people who’ve passed the Q and instructors is to trust your nose. Your nose is very good at smelling differences between things, so for many people the dry fragrance of the coffee grounds is the most helpful stage of the triangulation.

Yesterday in the practice round, my nose failed me for one of the three trays: dry fragrance told me one cup was different, but all 3 of my rounds of tasting told me it was a different one. I stuck with my nose and it turned out it was the other cup. Luckily, this was a practice round.

Today, my nose failed me again, but I caught it! There were 6 trays on the triangulation table, each with 3 cups. Here’s a refresher of what it may look like:

Trays 2 and 3 were dastardly. On the dry fragrance, tray 2 cup 3 was incredibly woody and bread-like, so I put a giant X and quite nearly called it a day on that tray. On tray 3, cup 3 smelled incredibly sour and fermented, so it earned another big X. I was feeling pretty good that my nose had easily solved 2 of the 6 triangles and had good guesses on the other 4, until we got to tasting.

When it came time to taste the coffees, everything went out of whack. Tray 2 Cup 3 tasted nothing like wood; it was just dry and astringent. Tray 3 cup 3 was just a standard, sweet coffee. Uhoh.

I went through tray 2 and 3 many times. Cups 2 and 3 on tray 2 were both astringent, which is a problem because I thought that cups 2 and 3 smelled very different. So I tasted that tray probably about 10 times and focused on the mouthfeel of the 3 cups. Cups 2 and 3 totally dried my mouth out, but cup 1 was a bit more sweet and had a softer body. This worried me even more, because mouthfeel has never been my most accurate triangulation sense.

Tray 3 was a different ballgame. Cup 3 tasted just fine (even though it smelled bad!) as did cup 2, but cup 1 was fruity! It tasted like guava and cantaloupe, while the others were just, fine honey-like-sweetness, mild coffees. But my nose! This was my biggest dilemma of my whole Q experience: my nose was positive it was cup 3, my mouth was positive it was cup 1. The reason you say “trust your nose” is that you can’t go back and smell the dry grounds again, but you can taste it again and convince yourself it basically tastes like anything. It took me about 20 of the 45 total minutes of the exercise, but I built up the courage to change my answer to what my mouth said.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, my disposition at the end of the exam. I was extremely nervous, and because I’d changed my answers (which you’re advised never to do!) I figured I’d likely have to retake Washed Milds Triangle for a 5th time somewhere else. Sigh. For everyone else, it wasn’t as big of a deal because they still had like 15 tests to go – I was the only one there for a retake, so this triangle alone was my make-it-or-break-it.

After the test, the instructor cleaned up and called us back into the room. He began with a speech: “I will not reveal the results now,” he explained, “because it’s incredibly important for us to focus on the next tests rather than dwell on the results of this one. This triangulation was incredibly difficult as many of the coffees tasted similar, so it will be best not to dwell on it.” (Uhoh.) “Thank you for your patience.”

“But,” he said “I am pleased to announce that Alex passed and he is now a Q grader.”

Wooooaawwwweee!!!! Everyone started clapping! I was laughing and tearing up a bit. The instructor and assistant gave me a pat on the back, and everyone shook my hand. My mouth was right!!

If you’re very lucky, you’ve had this sudden feeling of joy that fills your cheeks with a huge dopamine rush and you can’t stop grinning. The most intense one I’d ever experienced was when I was named the captain of the Roustabout color war team at Pierce Camp Birchmont when I was 14 years old, but that’s a story for another time. Since then, I’ve gotten lucky to feel that all-of-a-sudden sweep of emotion a few more times. I’m very excited to add today to that special list.

After the Q, I called my family to share the good news, and everyone was very happy for me. Then, I had an enormous ice cream sunday.

I was very pleased, and the ice cream was amazing. What a ride!

Some Extra Pics

In the days since the Q, I’ve gotten some pictures back of me tasting coffee and running cuppings. I feel like this blog post is a good time to share them, because I’m legit now!

Pictures from Williamsburg

The pictures from my Q class in Virginia were just posted online, so I thought I could share some of them here:

Cupping at La Palma

Elise, the cofounder of La Palma, was very gracious to take some pictures of me cupping for my blog. I got them a few days ago but didn’t feel like I had a good opportunity to post them, but they turned out great.

That’s it! Woohoo!

I’m off to El Fénix on Monday morning. In the meantime, I plan on basking in my excitement. Have a good one!

Alex