Coffee ‘cupping’ is the tasting of coffee to uncover the coffee’s unique profile. And in the rarified world of cupping, there are few who can rival Ken Davids for experience or expertise. Originally an academic and writer, Ken Davids has grown to be recognized as one of the coffee world’s pre-eminent figures. He has a consultancy business in the US and a number of highly regarded books on coffee to his credit. He is also a sought-after speaker at coffee conferences and seminars worldwide.

For many years Ken David’s was an academic – the dean of a large art and design college and a tenured Professor. But he caught the coffee bug, and is now considered one of the coffee world’s pre-eminent figures. He first published his break-through book Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing & Enjoying in 1975, followed by two more books (Espresso: Ultimate Coffee and Home Coffee Roasting: Romance & Revival).

According to Ken coffee is the most complex of all commonly consumed beverages and the most challenging to master and understand. Many more substances contribute to the aroma and flavour of coffee than contribute to the aroma and flavour of wine, for example. And coffee is a much more global and interactive beverage than wine. A good wine changes only gradually once it is bottled, whereas coffee is first created and then completely transformed by four different parties at four different points in its journey from seed to cup.

First someone chooses which seeds to plant and where and nurtures the trees, then someone harvests the coffee and performs the tremendously expressive and crucial acts of fruit removal and drying, then someone else again roasts it, and finally someone, often the consumer, brews it. Coffee continues to transform even after brewing, as it cools.

Ken divulged to Crema that some of his most formative life experiences came through coffee “Certainly the most transformative experience was meeting my future wife Iara in Brazil”.

Beyond that, he certainly had his share of coffee experiences both exotic and moving. Probably the most memorable of these was visiting the original port of Mocha or Al Mukh in Yemen. As most coffee lovers know, all of the commercially traded coffee in the world was grown in Yemen and the majority of it shipped through the port of Al Mukh for over 150 years, between around 1600 and 1750.

Possibly his second most memorable experience would be “sitting in on my first genuine village coffee ceremony in Ethiopia”. He talks more about this in his Crema Magazine article. He is most effusive about the explosion of knowledge about espresso currently taking place and the globalization of that knowledge. Although we are at the very beginning of the development of coffee as a genuine specialty beverage with a knowledge base comparable to wine, we are at least sneaking up on that goal.

As he says, “until recently all of the research money for coffee seemed to go into either increasing commodity yield and commodity consistency at origin or saving pennies on commodity roasting and packaging, but now at least some of those resources are being directed at achieving genuine product differentiation through botanical variety and processing nuance. Eventually we may begin to understand how to create not only great coffees, but distinctive coffees that reflect the individual tastes of a new generation of growers, exporters, roasters and aficionado consumers.”

By: Ashley Felderhof

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