Talking about the special treatment method | the story or taste is important? Is the special treatment coffee good?

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"the editor! I'm telling you, I recently drank a bean specially treated by XX fermentation, which is really special! " The enthusiastic sharing friend said with delight, "it doesn't taste like coffee at all!" Like red wine, like. "

"nothing like coffee at all?" …… The editor has mixed feelings in his heart.

There is always a saying in the coffee industry: "as long as you like it." There is nothing wrong with this argument. After all, the senses are very subjective. I like it, everyone likes it, but it tastes good.

So when the new form of treatment can make more wine, fermented flavor, yogurt and frankincense. To some extent, it should be more in line with the flavor requirements of "boutique coffee". In that case, the advent of the era of great treatment has created more special flavors, which should be a good thing.

However, is this really the case?

Go back in time, no need to go back a few decades, about seven or eight years ago, when shallow baking began to rise in China, what did the shops say at that time?

"Deep roasting is to cover up bad beans, while shallow roasting can show the" original taste "of coffee."

Today, we have gradually emerged a more objective concept: deep baking and shallow baking are not such a relationship. Deep baking and shallow baking are only the means of expression that the baker personally thinks are suitable for a bean or personal idea. the aim is still to show the "best performance" of a bean.

Any immature, moldy, sour, moth-eaten... It is impossible to whitewash it by deep baking, and even if the raw bean itself is in poor health and does not have enough material to provide reaction, deep baking will only taste full of carbon.

Let's look at the treatment on the same basis, and you probably won't hear this for the time being:

"heavy treatment is to cover up bad beans, and only traditional treatments (washing, honey treatment, sun exposure) can show the original taste of coffee."

However, as the severe treatment becomes more and more "severe" and more and more "common". The possibility that "heavy treatment can cover up bad beans" is becoming more and more possible.

The flavor of traditional treatments such as water washing, sun drying and honey treatment still depends on the quality of coffee cherries planted, with water washing as the most, and almost 100% on the natural sugar and nutrients absorbed and stored by coffee beans during their growth cycle. It can best reflect the variety, soil, maturity, and meticulous treatment. Wait for details. Even if the honey treatment or the sun, coffee cherry sugar content is not enough is useless.

Under the tide of boutique coffee, in addition to the pursuit of "refined" coffee, many people also seem to have forgotten, the premise of this exquisite is "Speciality".

The original intention of boutique coffee is "specialty coffee", and this feature should come from its "producing area" as much as possible, that is, variety, climate, soil quality, planting and so on. Details. With the decline of soil fertility and global climate change, the quality of coffee cherries is declining and the environment is unstable, so it is understandable that we have to rely on new treatments to generate flavor.

Carbon dioxide impregnation, anaerobic treatment. All kinds of more and more exquisite treatment methods emerge as the times require. But the characteristics that belong to a piece of land should still be pursued.

Just like the same lack of land power, the major wine producing areas still pursue local characteristics, because they know that human workmanship coupled with the uniqueness of land and weather is the irreplaceable foundation of a bottle of wine, blindly pursuing taste and forgetting the intertwined taste of heaven, earth and man. In essence, it is a bit too much for a cup of coffee to tell.

The flavor of a good cup of coffee should be able to tell a story, and the story should have at least three structures: nurturing its land characteristics, nourishing its climatic conditions, and taking care of its diligent sweat.

Those perceptual parts aside, from a chemical point of view, it may be much more effective and easier to use "treatment" to cover up the lack of quality of raw beans than "baking". After all, fermentation can involve more reaction conditions than baking (baking is only one reaction energy).

It is also because many special treatments are bound to produce some flavor that does not belong to coffee, which can even be called "unclean" from a professional point of view, so in the real coffee competition, the batches of special treatment are always very few (currently).

Because the flavor produced by this treatment is actually not in line with the purpose of fine coffee to a certain extent, what we are talking about here is not that the special treatment method does not meet the requirements of fine coffee. However, the practice of "bad raw beans but trying to cover up with special treatment" does not meet the requirements of fine coffee to some extent.

Just like deep baking powder can not decorate the defects and defects of raw beans, special treatment can not cover up the lack of congenital conditions such as variety, climate, soil, planting and so on. But the problem is that most people may not be able to drink it.

The pursuit of original flavor is not a kind of elitist pride, it is an "attitude" to guard what you drink, good flavor and real original flavor of the producing area, can prove that what you drink is absolutely real boutique coffee.

While the flavor is unique, but it is difficult to drink the heavy treatment of the local characteristics of the producing areas, it inevitably leaves people with the opportunity to wonder: "is it possible that the quality of raw beans is poor, so you have to spend a lot of money on special treatment?" Although not necessarily, such opportunities exist both chemically and humanly.

That's why professional coffee bidders treat special treatments so harshly. Beans with special treatment are good to drink occasionally, but the pursuit of "excessive" may make the whole market forget the original intention of fine coffee.

So when we go down to the market, in fact, our shopkeepers should also tell consumers what kind of things they drink, what kind of stories, what kind of cause and effect. This is in line with the exquisite and original intention of "from seed to cup". Right?

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