Being able to talk about coffee among college students is the same as knowing how to talk about wine over dinner with 30-somethings. Kind of an important skill. This presentation gave me the vocabulary (a simple dark roast vs. ) and the historical/procedural knowledge of coffee that would give me a leg up at fancy dinner conversations. I honestly had no clue about anything about coffee- I didn’t drink start drinking it until college and my mom just had the regular Folger’s brew in the morning. I couldn’t afford to buy Starbucks when I was in high school like my friends, who went daily and had their super-tailored orders down, and I was always embarrassed that I didn’t understand the difference between a frap and a cap, or what made a macchiato a macchiato. The two Gimme! presenters were really knowledgeable and never got too pretentious about their high-quality coffee (except for the “Pumpkin Spice is inferior” line). I felt like I was given a crash course on everything about coffee

A few of things that were finally cleared up for me yesterday were:

• you would have to drink twice your body weight in coffee before you’d die from the caffeine amount, but you’d die of overhydration first anyway
• the coffee bean is a seed inside of the coffee cherry which is form the coffee plant
• first coffee plant from Ethiopia
• the current trend of coffee is from Ethiopia too (last year was Kenya)
• the trend a few years ago was Guatemalan coffee, but they’ve been hit by a coffee rust
• the plant takes 5 years to grow, which is why it’s so difficult to be a coffee plant farmer because you
• the reason why Americans like their coffee “like mud” or “earthy” is because we’ve gotten most of our coffee from Brazil, but Brazil has automated pickings (they use machines instead of people to pick the coffee) so when they shake the trees, twigs and dirt fall in with the coffee, which mixes into the taste.
• coffee isn’t earthy in taste, but is actually light and kind of fruity
• coffee shouldn’t be roasted past 15 minutes, then it reaches a point where all the flavor is taken out (this is what Dunkin Donuts/Starbucks does)
• all flavored coffee is coffee that’s over-roasted, then sprayed with chemicals (flavors) and isn’t every of good quality