Attended my first coffee cupping at the roasting facility of NOVO Coffee in the RiNo Art District of Denver this past Friday. My host was Erich Rosenberg, Head Roaster for NOVO Coffee with the rest or our tour group consisted of Robbie from Ritual Chocolate along with some of his employees. Ritual Chocolate is a Craft Chocolate company also located in the RiNo District of Denver. Erich walked us through the warehouse area where we looked at and smelled green coffees that had arrived from around the world. Seeing these pre-roasted coffees in their jute 130lb bags gives you a real sense of how far this product has travelled before it gets to your morning cup and the amazing amount of work it takes to get a hold of this stuff. Erich walked us through the roasting process and explained that with variations of time and temperature how the best flavor nuances of the worlds top quality coffees are brought out and presented for the brewing process.
We moved on to the tasting room where four small Pyrex bowels had been set out for each taster containing a measured quantity of different coffee from NOVO's stock. I won't go into the whole cupping process because most of what I learned I got from watching and listening to Erich as he walked us through it. I can only stress that to get a real feel for a cupping you have to take part in one and not just watch a video on it. Everything depends on your ability to see, touch, smell and taste to get a real sense of all the wonderful things that are going on with the coffee. This truly opened my senses up to a whole new world of coffee. And to make it even better Robbie gave out samples of Ritual Chocolate made with NOVO's Anyestu Coffee and Ritual's Balao Chocolate. Amazing.
I would recommend this tour to anyone interested in taking coffee to a higher level of appreciation and understanding of what top quality coffee can truly be.
