Experiencing Carrboro's Coffee Buzz

This weekend’s food blog has to do with what keeps most of us students functioning, despite numerous sleepless nights of homework or debauchery.

It’s the miracle beverage, the elixir of life: coffee.

On Saturday my friend Pooja Ravindran and I attended Carrboro Coffee Roasters’ workshop on cupping at the Open Eye Café. A spectacular resource, the class helped me appreciate the beverage even further by explaining the complex and drawn-out process of identifying quality beans and determining how to roast each crop.

Carrboro Coffee Roasters president Scott Conary walked us through the process. In it, roasters lightly roast different crops, sniff them for fragrance qualities, and then immerse the beans in hot water to brew the coffee. After the beverage is ready, roasters break the “crust” of grounds at the top and sniff the drink for more aromatic notes. Then, after cleaning off some of the grinds, they taste the beverage at different intervals of time for consistent and varying flavor notes that may change as the drink cools.

After we had a mock tasting and evaluation session with a few different types of beans, in which we tried to identify flavor and aroma notes from berries to toast to corn, Conary took us around the facilities and explained the process of how a bean comes from being the pit of a coffee cherry in a farmer’s plot to the finished product at the roaster.

The intense vetting of the beans for quality and the amount of trials and tribulations to create the final product that Conary explained made me appreciate the coffee I drink even more; something I didn’t even think was possible considering my already
semi-concerning love affair with the beverage.

The free workshop, as part of a series, was a great experience that I would highly recommend to both coffee neophytes and hardened pot-a-dayers. If anything, they at least allow you an enlightening bargain of a way to spend your Saturday morning
while talking about one of the greatest beverages in the world.