Palate Fail

I have a pretty good palate, generally speaking. I don't lay claim to the sensory capacities of a professional cook, merely to the ability to perceive, in a broadly objective sense, whether or not a dish tastes right - whether or not it has been properly seasoned, is in or out of balance, consists of flavors that work well or poorly together, that sort of thing. The flip side of training one's palate to taste objectively (OK, fine, "objective taste" may be conceptually oxymoronic, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one - there is such a thing as objective quality with respect to food, and no matter how many shades of subjective gray might litter the middle of the spectrum, the "good" and "bad" at the extremes remain unequivocal) is that one must - eventually and, more likely, frequently - face the fact that what is good and what one likes do not always describe the same mouthful.

Case in point: Coffee. I recently posted about the merits of local, "micro" roasters, and specifically why freshness - of both the roast and the percolation - has such a dramatic impact on the flavor of coffee. The thing is, once you understand why the flavor of coffee goes bad (it's all about the reduction-oxidation process, as explained by the Specialty Coffee Association people here), you must also accept that the most popular, commercially available "fresh" beans are overcooked: Heat is ultimately an enemy of coffee aromatics, so really hard roasting, at least as practiced by the industry leaders such as Starbucks and Peets, inevitably raises the proportion of "bad" flavors and certainly degrades the proportions of many "good" ones. My personal coffee mea culpa is this: I like bad coffee. Not shitty coffee: I care not at all for the taste of two-day-old-and-tasting-of-burnt-gym-socks coffee, of low-grade beans apparently canned sometime during the early days of the Cold War, of Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's "Cafes".
But I do love my Peets. Starbucks may be a godsend in an airport or the middle of Interstate 5, but otherwise, you can keep your SBUX. But seriously - all those bitter, smoky, dark-chocolate flavors in a good cup of Peet's? If the price is that I lose some subtlety, that I should probably buy blends in preference to "single origins", that maybe there is just a hint of burnt? I will happily settle up on those terms, because everything else strikes me as watery or, worse, dirty. That being said, I can also recognize when I'm wrong, and in this case, I'm wrong - Peets uniformly roasts their beans for too long, or too hot, or both - I'm not sure which - in order to get their exceptionally dark roast. And while I love it, I also accept it for what it is, and more importantly, what it isn't: If I really cared about the terroir of coffee the way I do about wine, I would buy it from somebody like Blue Bottle, or our own local roaster, the Flying Goat: Both specialize in fair-trade, organic beans of the highest quality, emphasize the importance of individual terroirs, and - in order to express this specialization, both roast to a significantly lesser degree than Peets or any of their ilk.

The impetus for this particular post is that we just received a gift of Blue Bottle Yirgachefe from our good friends, the B's. I hadn't heard of Blue Bottle, but the B's, by any definition, remain unrepentant foodies, and I tend to take their views of local purveyors of just about anything that goes in my mouth quite seriously. Roast date? The 20th. Not bad, as my wife J brewed up our fine gift into an extremely fresh cup this morning. We dutifully let the water come off the boil; we patiently await the French press and tolerate its sludge; in short, we give this coffee whatever chances we can to show its true colors. The result? Pretty damned good, if you like it in all its medium-roasted, slightly dirty glory. It is more balanced, more complex, more unique than my Peets. But still and all, I'm sorry, but give me the black-as-night, stain-your-gums brew any day. I know I'm wrong, but I just like it that way.