Coffee Guy on Vacation

So what do coffee guys do on vacation? If you have been traveling a lot, you lock yourself in your house for a week and chill out and eat home cooked meals. Otherwise you usually spend it somewhere in the coffee world on somewhat of a working vacation.. This year during my vacation, I was invited to run an inter-island cupping for the Hawaiian Coffee Association.

This will be the first time Hawaii has ever really held an event that allowed samples from farms from all over the islands to participate in competition. At the beginning we were unsure if anybody would even participate. The samples came trickling in and it looked like there would be about 15 farms participating. Then right at the end of the time allowed to submit samples, they came flowing in. The total ended up being 69!

All of the samples were coded with a two digit number and then mailed to me. Nobody on the judging panel knows which farm, island or district the coffees are from- it’s truly blind. We started it off by roasting all of the samples, cupping them and scoring them on the mainland. This was done to get a first look at the coffees, weed out some, and get an initial ranking of the group.

The cupping of the first group of samples went really well. We got through all 69 coffees in two days- no easy feat! There were a couple of … ummmm… no so good coffees, a big group of nice ones and a handful of some really exceptional ones. Now that they have all been ranked, I sent the samples back to the Hawaiian Coffee Association for delivery to a cupping lab on Maui. Here we will take the top scoring coffees, re-roast them and go through the process all over again with the top half of the group.

Once the process is done the HCA will be giving the rankings to the farmers to where they stack up in their district or island as well as how the stack up against coffees from other places in the islands.