Follow us, dear readers, as we paid a visit to the dwelling of Adi “Peminum Kopi” Taroepratjeka’s and see how he shares his tips and tricks for getting it down and dirty with coffee.

The first thing first that came out in our plan to work this delicate coffee issue was to work with this man of many talents. Public knows him as a local TV show host who travels around in search for our coffee roots, straight to the plantations in rural Indonesia.

For those who knew already Adi Taroepratjeka before that, he’s already the right guy to ask about practically everything. Years of ups and downs, he had gone through as both businessman and consultant. Even as we speak of him now, he’s currently preparing himself to become Coffee Quality Institute’s certified instructor. It would be an important addition to the Q Grader qualification he already had in his possession.

CQI’s instructor degree itself is a prestigious achievement where only a handful of people in the whole world have gone to the length to accomplish that. He hopes to contribute more for the Indonesian coffee world, so he said, but always in avoidance with the talk about the credit he should receive as an important persona in Indonesian coffee world so far. He’s just naturally humble.

To the envy of many, he has been doing this for quite some time now with her lovely wife who happens to be a certified coffee expert as well, Mia Laksmi. That’s why we decided to pay the couple a visit at his apartment to play some games about coffee, to talk about it, and to enjoy the hallowed drink together.

In this feature, Adi will show you how to conduct a simplified but proper coffee cupping session, a practical comparative study on pseudo espresso versus espresso from the real machine, and lastly – home roasting with a wajan!

Coffee cupping

When it comes to cupping, Adi posed a question for us all first.

“Are you sure you want to do this at home? Cupping requires good measurement, a lot of resources, and pile of cups that you need to wash afterwards!” his merry laughter quickly echoed around the apartment.

Coffee cupping itself is a vital process to direct how a coffee company would like to profile its product for the market. Therefore, the initial roasting process itself has to set the coffee at a “neutral” level where the Master Tasters can determine what to do with the potentials and the weakness alike.

At the very least, we can always do the cupping at home with these steps while discounting the prerequisite roasting process. Let’s save that thing for pros for now because the purpose is the education itself. Who knows that this might inspire you to reach the next level with coffee, right?

If you are keen, you can always download the score sheet from Specialty Coffee Association of America’s website and study each category by yourself or under the guidance of an expert.

Without further due, here are some basic things that you have to prepare and the steps on how to do it:

1. Prepare some roasted beans, preferably medium to dark roast so that there will be a lot of characters to explore.

2. Prepare five cups of equal size. Measure correctly the amount of coffee needed for each cup with a small electronic scale. The optimum ratio is 8.25 grams of coffee beans per 150 ml of water.

3. Boil the water up to 92C – 95C. Be sure to use mineral water since the minerals will push out the essential oils from the coffee during the brewing and bringing out its potentials.

4. Use the commercial hand coffee grinder for one cup at a time. Don’t grind it too finely. Make it a bit coarse.

5. Before brewing it, sniff the dry aroma and grade the fragrance level.

6. Set the timer for about 4 minutes and brew the coffee in whirling motion so that it will mix well.

7. After four minutes, start to remove the upper crust with a spoon and study the fragrance (sniff deeply the break/wet aroma).

8. Loudly slurp each cup one at a time. Start to score the flavor and the after taste.

9. Wait for a while until the temperature drops to around 67C.

10. At this temperature, it will be easier for our tongue to score the remaining categories such as the acidity, sweetness, body, and balance. Uniformity and clean cup categories are to be filled as well at this point.

11. Lastly, you can always put your own subjective judgment in the Overall category and then add the total score.

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TO BE CONTINUED

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Featured in THE FOODIE MAGAZINE March 2015 edition

Download it for free here via SCOOP!

Photography by Dennie Ramon