Coffee cupping report

I tried five coffees, after listening to the five leading San Francisco micro-coffee-brewing experts.  Cupping is the professional way to taste coffee.  Brew it with 180 degree water in a Chemex or french press.  Put in a cup to smell, hot.  Let cool until sediment drops out and then taste lukewarm.  I don't like the flavor this way, I like it as hot espresso, but this is a fair way to make comparisons.

I tasted one blend and four estate grown, so called, single source coffees.  The two best, for my tongue, came from Costa Rica (Equator Estates montes de Oro, and 4 Barrel's Costa Rican) and the very best was brewed with a device like my AeroPress mentioned earlier.

Altitude matters, the specific farm matters, getting the beans to the U.S. fresh matters, and roasting counts a little, in these days of specialty brews all are roasted well.  1) Only buy what you can use in the 3 to 7 days after roasting.  2) Drink immediately after grinding.

For you anti-corporate Neanderthals, everyone is buying their own coffee farms whether its specialty brewers or MacDonald's.  (Starbucks isn't, yet.) All good coffee is fair trade (fair trade is $1 per pound) because high quality beans ($4 and up) require higher paid more meticulous workers.

After all this coffee tasting I decided that I needed a baseline of good coffee as a standard measure.  I went to Japantown and bought the UCC Original blend (from Japan).  It has always advertised a large component of Blue Mountain coffee which comes from Jamaica which is close to Costa Rica in climate but has smaller mountains.  UCC is just as good or better than the finest single estate coffee I tasted.