Collegiate Times

Correction: This story has been modified from its original version. — "Deet's coffee college: Journey to center of bean," (CT, Feb. 15) was incorrect. This semester includes another coffee college, called "Trips to Origin and the importance of relationships with growers

All aficionados have their own Mecca for their particular flavorful, aromatic product: wine lovers have the Bordeaux region, illegal indulgers have Amsterdam, and coffee drinkers have Blacksburg.

That's right, Blacksburg, a town thought only to harbor Hokie football and collegiate-level drinking has its very own coffee experts within its small, bucolic confines.

Bearded, bespectacled coffee roaster extraordinaire Brian Babcock, bean roaster and purchaser of the Easy Chair Cafe, and affable blend master Don Harvey, manager of Deet's Place, put on a Coffee College: "two classes each semester, the first one describing the process of how coffee goes from seed to cup," said Harvey. The second involves a much more hands-on approach, centered on a process which insiders call "cupping."

Babcock describes cupping as the "sensory evaluation of coffee, analogous with wine tasting," as the process borrows much from the refined tasting of its more intoxicating beverage brethren. Coffee experts use cupping as a means of determining the best roast time and temperature, the best process with which to dry the beans, as well as many other intricate, nearly infinite variables, with each one affecting the taste so much that only "cupping masters" can truly tell.

The actual process of cupping can take any regular coffee drinker aback. It starts with three or more bowls of coffee grounds, with the taster sniffing each one and comparing their aromas, using such adjectives as cardboardy, winey, or earthy to name a few. At first, trying to find the best subjective descriptor can be like searching for a bottle cap in a bathtub full of quarters, but once someone mentions a close one, the connection immediately sticks.

After significant sniffing, hot water is poured over the grounds and left to sit for four minutes, resulting in a striation of half-solidified grounds on top and a mixture of coffee and the annoying pieces that didn't stick to the top. Take a soup spoon, break the crust and dip your nose into it, sniffing fully to divine the difference between the aroma and the fragrance, the term for the smell of wet coffee.

After lots of whiffing, spoon out the grounds, dip your spoon in and slurp the fresh coffee back. The act of slurping splashes the coffee all over the mouth and tongue, touching all the taste buds so as to figure out whether the coffee is bitter, sweet, salty or sour, the four distinct regions of the tongue. Depending on the characteristics of the coffee, it will linger on one, or if it possesses a complex flavor, a few of the regions.

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