Hey…
…did you know that there’s a specific type of person who actually drinks coffee for a living? Yup – they’re called ‘Cuppers’, and their job description entails travelling around the world to find the most exciting new suppliers and beans, obsessively refining combinations of these into blends, and then working out how best to prepare them – making the ‘job’ of the drinker (you and I) as easy as possible.
So, if you’re a coffee drinker, a professional Cupper makes for a real fascinating chat, and with this in mind, when I found one hanging out in the basement of a coffee shop in Leather Lane (Prufrock Coffee, if you’re wondering), I saw my chance to write something uh…’educational’.
So… introducing encyclopaedic coffee man – John Thompson of Cafepod – the guy behind the brand’s various blends, and I suppose what you could call something of a caffeine concocting culinary strategist.
And how’s that for a weird sentence?
Full Name: John Thompson
DOB: February 1974
Birthplace: Haltwhistle, Northumberland
Twitter: @CafePodTweets
Website: http://www.cafepod.com/
Fun Fact: My first gig (aged 12 or 13 I think) was Anthrax
Till we’d met I wasn’t even aware of professional coffee cuppers (I guess that shows me!). So, what makes a good cupper? – how did you get to where you are today, and could you let us know what your work entails? is there accreditation?
Having a trainable palate is the starting point for being any taster, whether it be a cupper in coffee or someone who tastes wine. Separating your basic tastes is the starting point, looking to see how sweet, sour, salty, and bitter a coffee is. From there training yourself to recognise flavours in coffee is the next stage – for example, is this coffee caramel like, hazelnut like or does it have a flavour reminiscent of chocolate.
Practice makes perfect and cupping coffees regularly is important in building your skill base and also for building a taste database of different coffees from around the world. After that being able to be really consistent in the way you look at coffee is very important. There are accreditations that check you can do this such as the Q grader programme or modules of the SCAE diploma. Both of these are globally recognised and put cuppers through a number of blind tests to make sure you can evaluate coffee in a professional and consistent manner.
I read you travel around the world in search of new flavours and blends, could you give me an idea of what a typical week is like for you?
A lot of my week involves cupping (professional coffee tasting). I spend a lot of time looking at samples of coffees to buy from around the world. At the minute there are a lot of offers from countries like Brazil, Peru and Bolivia who harvested their coffee through the British summer time. I also taste all the roasts we pack into capsules to make sure the coffee has developed properly in the roaster to bring out the flavour profile of each blend and do extra quality checks on the packs to make sure the capsules stay fresh until they are brewed.
In terms of travel I visit producing countries around three to four times a year. It’s important to visit farmers and their farms and understand their processes, their quality, and also to build relationships.
Could you take us through life at Cafepod? What’s a typical day like for you guys, and what do you do at the company?
There really isn’t one typical day for us, but we tend to spend most of our time tasting coffee, chatting to consumers, forecasting our production runs, ensuring the orders get out to our customers and tasting more coffee!
What are your thoughts on decaf?
Decaf coffee is important because some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others, and many people also like to limit their caffeine intake, particularly later in the day. At CafePod it’s important to us to use great coffee for our decaf because good green unroasted beans make better decaf. We also use the water process for our decaf, a chemical free process that preserves the flavour profile of the coffee well.
It’s also good to know that there are a lot of positives to a moderate intake of caffeine. Studies have shown there is a benefit to performance in endurance sports, mental alertness and no negative effects in cardiovascular health.
And your thoughts on instant coffee?
I try not to compare roast and ground coffee to instant coffee, and look at instant as a coffee based drink rather than coffee per se. At CaféPod we’re proud that we can deliver a coffee with all the convenience of instant but with the quality and flavour of roast and ground coffee.
I can’t imagine that you’re not a serious coffee drinker yourself. What ways do you like to enjoy it, and what’s your favourite blend? Do you prepare yours in a Nespresso machine ?
The great thing about coffee is that there is a huge amount of diversity of flavour to be found from country to country, and this changes by the variety grown and the process used to get the coffee from the fruit so I tend to drink different coffees from day to day.
I will drink different coffees at different times because we want to experience different types of drinks at different times of the day. For example I like to start the day with a longer drink but as the day goes on I’m more likely to drink an espresso.
I’ve a plethora of coffee brewing equipment for this and yes, I do have a Nespresso machine in the house too which I use.
If you could go back to the beginning and start over, what would you change or do differently?
There’s very little in life I think I’d like to change. Coffee is an endlessly changing world to be part of so the process of learning never stops. That’s one of the great things about coffee capsules – they have changed the way people drink coffee from a decade ago.
What advice would you give to aspiring coffee pros, looking to do what you do?
Enjoy the experience of learning about taste and flavour in coffee and try and understand why certain coffees taste the way they do as a result of where they grew and how they have been roasted. There’s so much diversity to be found in coffee that if you are naturally inquisitive there will be more than enough information to keep you satisfied for a lifetime.
What do you enjoy most and least about what you do?
I’m very lucky in that my job is really varied and interesting so there’s a lot of great things about it. If it came down to it I find the process of tasting endlessly fascinating and ever changing – there will never be a point when a taster is not learning something new and speciality coffee is such an innovative field too.
We are very much at the beginning of a journey understanding why coffee tastes the way it does in different countries with different varieties and it’s exciting to continue learning about this.
The downside to work has to be the washing up… I might taste three hundred coffees in a week and that leaves a lot of washing up to be done, never my strong point.
If you weren’t a coffee wizard, what would you be doing instead?
It would have to be something food and travel related. I’m very interested in taste and flavour generally and spend a lot of my spare time cooking and reading about food. My work does help with this, and the principles of balancing the tastes in any meal are similar to those of creating a coffee blend in that you want all the components to complement each other.
As for the travel, I’ve been so lucky in that I’ve travelled to so many countries with my work, experienced many different cultures, and met many fascinating people that any other job would have to involve some travel.
Now I’d like to move on to educating myself and some of our readership on coffee, if you’ll indulge us…
What do laypeople, and ‘casual’ drinkers need to know about coffee? What is the one most important thing, you reckon?
Drinking coffee is very much about personal preference, so if people are able to identify the types of coffee they enjoy drinking then it will help to guide their choice, i.e. strong vs. mild or bold vs. smooth. Using the strength numbers and tasting notes of the coffee will help to inform their decision about which coffee will suit their personal taste.
When is coffee best drunk black? And when is it best consumed with milk, sugar, and other ingredients?
This is very much something for the coffee drinker to decide because coffee drinking is all about enjoyment. Some coffees, particularly lighter more delicate roasts lend themselves to being drunk black but there are no hard and fast rules in coffee.
At CaféPod we work very hard on our flavour descriptions to make sure the coffee drinker at home get the same flavours as we write on the pack. Ideally, great coffees will have enough sweetness to mean there is no need for sugar and added sweeteners will mask flavour attributes.
If you could condense your substantial coffee wisdom into a few paragraphs…what does the regular Joe need to know about buying or making a good cuppa Joe? (see what I did there…?)
Freshness and great extraction are so important in making great tasting coffee. Capsule machines are great in that they remove the inconsistency of coffee brewing. They make the same coffee to the same strength in the same amount of time day in day out.
At CaféPod we also use special foil packaging to make sure there is no oxygen, a real enemy of fresh coffee, surrounding the capsule until it’s ready to be brewed. This freshness makes such a difference in preserving the aromatics of coffee.
Are there any types of coffee that are lesser well known but you think people should try out?
Taste is very personal and I think it’s important that people always enjoy their coffee for what it is. Trying blends is a great way to start experiencing coffee because the blenders will have created accessible complementary tastes and flavours from different coffees. Try different roast heights to see what you enjoy and once you have explored different blends moving into single origin coffees can be a great way to discover the diversity in the world of coffee.
Countries are always changing in the way they process coffee too and countries like El Salvador, Rwanda and Burundi have much more visibility in the world of coffee than they did twenty years ago. These countries are less well known than the large producing countries like Brazil or traditional high quality producing countries like Costa Rica but still produce some delicious coffees.
What’s the difference between the various kinds of beans?
There are a couple of key differences to look for in coffee to start with, the botany and the roasting style. Firstly, there are two different species of coffee we grow and drink, Arabica and Robusta. These have distinctly different taste and flavour profiles with Arabica generally being lighter bodied and a little more acidic (like the zest of a citrus fruit) than the more full bodied, punchy, and slightly more bitter Robusta.
Secondly, the way a coffee roaster roasts their beans can hugely change flavour profile. Lighter roasts are more delicate, brighter, and often have more fruit like flavours present. As roasting continues, caramel, land and chocolate like flavours develop and then these then turn towards more spice like or resinous flavours as roasts become very dark. The level of roast height people like is again very subjective so as mentioned in the last question, I always recommend people find something they like.
Certain coffees are best suited to certain occasions, right? Could you elaborate a little on how that works?
We all like our daily routines as humans so having a coffee and style of drink for the first thing is important. We know how we like it, what the taste profile is and how it fits into our daily pattern. For coffees like this an accessible, flavourful blend with all the quality of the high street café works really well.
As the day moves on our palates look for different flavours so having the flexibility of having a different drink to brew means you can get the coffee you are looking for. In the middle of the day I may want a fuller fruit driven coffee with distinct characteristics, and at the end of a meal I prefer not to have a large volume of liquid so an espresso works very well.
Sometimes we want a little treat too or something a bit unusual so spending a little more on a gourmet single origin if we are having friends round definitely fits the occasion. El Salvador is a great country to start with single origins because many of the coffees, particularly those from around the Santa Ana volcano in the West, have an underlying caramel like flavour that is appealing to many people.
Can you do taste pairings of coffee with other things, such as food, or wine?
Definitely, and some of this matches selecting coffees for certain occasions as we just mentioned. Beyond that, serving lighter more citrus focused coffees in the morning suits breakfast pastries very well. On a cold winter evening, a fuller roasted coffee full of dark chocolate and cinnamon like flavours goes well with richer winter dishes.
What’s your favourite kind of coffee preparation? What are the differences between say, instant coffee, using a cafetiere, a coffee machine, and one of those metal ones that you place on a hob? You guys at Cafepod use the Nespresso machine – why did you choose that format?
Coffee is a big part of my life so I have a dozen or so different coffee brewers at home. I’m also OK with knowing this is a bit unusual, and that most people have one or two preferred methods of making their coffee.
What separates the different brew methods you mention is extraction. Capsule machines like a Nespresso machine use pressure and hot water to brew coffee quickly and consistently similar to the way an espresso machine in a café works, where as a traditional filter or French press brews for longer under atmospheric pressure. The metal stove top you mention is a tricky brew method to get right because the physical properties of the metal brewer get in the way of making good coffee and can easily scorch the grounds.
Navigating these machines can be hard and that is why coffee capsules are changing the way people drink coffee allowing them to get great tasting coffee in a very repeatable way. Not knowing how to gauge how much coffee to use with water has always been hard for many coffee drinkers at home and capsules take this out of the equation.
And we always ask three customary ridiculous questions…
If you had to be transformed into any kind of household appliance, but retained your memories, ability to speak and personality, what would you pick?
While the answer here probably has to be a Nespresso machine you didn’t mention that I would retain my palate so it would be tortuous brewing coffee all day and not being able to drink it. I think I’d have to be a TV or tablet so I can take myself off to the places I’ve been with my job over the years.
If you had to employ a member of the Avengers to come and work, full time, at Cafepod, who’d you choose, and why?
This is where I show my age …is this the 60’s one or the modern film? I think Emma Peel and co. in the original TV show look hardened tea drinkers whereas Iron Man from the recent film is almost certainly an espresso drinker and has to get my vote.
If the army donated a fully functioning tank to Cafepod (and paid all it’s fuel and ammo expenses for perpetuity) what would you do with it?
We could best use it as a high tech coffee tank kitted out with CaféPod coffee and a number of Nespresso machines, travelling up and down the country handing out CaféPod espressos to stimulate the nation.
Additional Image Credits: coffee-katie.deviantart.com