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The sound of 17 cuppers slurping coffee resounded in Ethiopia’s Central Liquoring Lab. Through the cacophony, one deep, slow slurp resonated and caught my attention. “Too fast and you can’t catch the depth of the flavor,” Abraham Begashaw, head of the Ethiopian Coffee Authority and masterful cupper, would later say. “Fast is for defects. If you slow down, your senses will capture the completeness of an exemplary cup.”
I had accepted an invitation to be a judge in the first Ethiopian Cooperative Coffees Competition in Addis Ababa, held in March. Cooperatives from Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, Nekempte, Harar, Limu, Jimma and Kafa Forest (coffee’s birthplace) had put meticulous effort into preparing their finest 20-bag lots of coffee. Some entered lots in both washed and unwashed categories.
I cupped on the same table as Phyllis Johnson, a friend and importer specializing in African coffees, during the competition’s first round. Nearly 3,000 cups from 126 cooperatives would be tasted during the week by the panel of 17 judges. But it was one special cup that silenced the spitting, gurgling and clanking in the background and captured our complete attention: Lot 189. Phyllis was next in line as I took in the dry fragrance. The best Yirgacheffe-type floral character and the most intense and clean Harar-like coffee fruit combined in the nose so powerfully that my spine felt electrified. I moved along to the next coffee as I looked back at Phyllis. Eyes wide, Kampi Cooperative coffee having stirred her nostrils wide awake, we couldn’t help but break the communication rules of cupping to acknowledge what we had just smelled.
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