Written by Sebastian Cromwell. Andytown Lead Production Assistant
Early in October I saw an Instagram post from the Coffee Roasters Guild announcing that this year’s Sensory Summit was being held virtually and that there would be 25 full scholarship registrations. A few days later, Carver *shout out to you my dude* included the link to register for the scholarship lottery in the Andytowner’s newsletter. Like everything else in my life that appears in multiples, I saw these little bits of information as the universe offering up an opportunity that I should seek out. And so, I filled out the surprisingly simple scholarship registration form and hoped for the best! Low and behold, I got an email a few days later announcing that I had been chosen as a scholarship recipient. I was stoked!
And then I realized what exactly I had gotten myself into... For a decade now I have worked in specialty coffee, as a Barista and now as Production Lead. I fell in love with coffee as a youngin making Folgers with my Mom and since then it has been a mission of mine to learn as much as I can about coffee. But let’s be real, it ain’t always easy to access these types of educational opportunities. The Sensory Summit was the first SCA event I have ever attended and the scholarship made it accessible for me to be able to. And yet still, I had to take time off in order to attend. Thankfully Andytown encourages us to seek out opportunities like this and has funds to help make beautiful things happen, like getting paid to nerd out on sensory science!!
The Sensory Summit included exercises that required us to taste different foods to help us explore taste attributes and how to better use flavor notes to describe coffees.
I will admit--some of the sessions during the two day conference were well over my head. My goal was to learn more about sensory science and get some exposure to what is going on in the coffee world outside of Andytown. One of the most interesting sessions to me was learning about Fabiana Carvalho’s research on multisensory flavor perception. Have you ever wondered why the Wind and Sea label is blue and not red? What about the tasting notes you get for the same coffee when you drink from a textured ceramic mug versus a smooth ceramic mug? This all really got my mind flowing and I still haven’t stopped thinking about how rad it would be if we included music pairings to compliment each coffee offering *queue Carole King’s “Bitter with the Sweet”* to customers on our website.
As we all know, COVID-19 has changed the way we experience coffee and continues to challenge us in shifting our approach in so many ways. It was really awesome to see how the SCA and Roasters Guild focused on presenting leading research on ways we can assess quality coffee without being highly trained Q-graders, by using the descriptive cupping analysis form for example.
During a year that has limited our sensory experiences of consuming coffee drastically, being able to attend the Sensory Summit this year gave me hope for the future. There are so many awesome opportunities like this going on, even during a pandemic. I find following coffee industry Instagram accounts to be helpful resources for finding out about what’s happening in the coffee world. Here are a few of my favorites
@royal.coffee.inc @sca_us @umeshiso_ @getchusomegear @glittercatbarista. I hope that y’all seek out ways to learn, advance and find joy in your lives. Stay caffeinated. Stay healthy.