The Fermentation Project: Brio x James Hoffmann

One coffee, four fermentation methods — you're about to embark on a wild and wonderful world of coffee processing with thousands of your coffee friends. 

We're so glad you're here! Brio Coffeeworks is thrilled to participate in The Fermentation Project in partnership with James Hoffmann and Lucia Solis. Following in the footsteps of The Decaf Project last year, we have an exciting and unprecedented opportunity for coffee fans around the world to join together to explore the unique impact of fermentation processing methods on a single, exceptional coffee lot. We're showcasing four distinct processes on a coffee grown at Guatemala's Finca San Miguel Urias, owned by Hector and Lilian Leal. 

This project was designed as an educational tool to talk about the power and limitations of controlled fermentation. It's an opportunity to create conversations around the role of processing beyond creating intense flavors associated with co-ferments or extreme processing.

What Makes this Project So Special?

• Four Processes, One Coffee: An unprecedented access to explore the nuances of each fermentation method.

• Coffee with a Story: Sourced from the highlands of Guatemala at Finca San Miguel Urias, and owned by Hector and Lilian Leal.

• An Additional Tasting Experience: You can taste these coffees along with James and the global coffee community online on Saturday, October 3rd, 10AM EST.

• Complete your experience with a one-of-a-kind artist tee created exclusively for this project by Matt deForest Jenkins).

The Tasting Box Set

Each Box Set includes four 60-gram bags of whole bean coffee processed in four different ways:

Here are the parameters we use for cupping at the roastery. We use cupping bowls but any vessels will do, don’t worry**:

• 10g coffee
• 182g water (200F) - this is a 1:18.2 coffee to water brew ratio
• Grind size: the official Specialty Coffee Association guidelines call for a slightly coarser than pourover grind.  We prefer a slightly finer than pourover grind.

**If you have a cupping vessel, they should accomodate the above ratio. Otherwise, just grab 4 vessels of the same size - can be mugs, cups, really anything, and measure their volume. We suggest filling them (if they are large enough) to our standards above. But if they are smaller, just use a 1:18.2 coffee to water brew ratio (this is standard Specialty Coffee cupping ratio).

Cupping Protocol:

• Grind your samples for each cup (tip: we like to use a few beans of a coffee to "purge" in between grinding each coffee. 
• Smell and evaluate the dry aroma. 
• Once all samples are ground, pour your water over the grounds. You don't have to be careful as when making a pourover. The goal of the game here is to saturate all the grounds and make sure coffee is covered with water - so if you see any dry spots - pour over that spot. 
• Start your timer - brew all samples until 4 minutes.
• You will start seeing a nice coffee "crust" forming. 
• At 4 minutes, break the crust of each sample with a spoon (If you have a cupping spoon, awesome, otherwise, use whatever spoon you have on hand.) 
• Tip: push the crust forward with your spoon - we will follow this up with two more rounds - with spoon right underneath the crust and up, and again, underneath the crust and up.  The goal is to push all the grounds from the crust down in the bowl/cup. 
• Let the coffees cool. Now is also a great time to evaluate and smell the wet frangrance of each sample. 
• When the coffee is still hot, but has cooled down just slightly (about 5-8 minutes), you can start slurping. 
• We typically will do at least 3 passes of each sample, one after the other. The first is for first impressions (i.e, do we like it/not, what stands out, etc). Then, we'll do more passes as the coffee is cooling and note attributes such as: 
• acidity
• body
• sweetness
• balance
• flavor
• and most importantly - do we like it? anything stood out? 
• We'll often go back again to the samples until we've gotten a really great impression of each coffee. 

Happy cupping! 

More…

Check out this video where James explains the fermentation methods in more detail.

And here's some more from Lucia and her team on each method in the Box Set: 

"Using the same starting material, we created 4 different versions of the coffee to illustrate the effect of fermentation and processing on the same coffee. When people taste “fermented” coffees, they rarely get to taste the un-fermented version for comparison.

All the coffees started as washed coffees (Mechanically Demucilaged coffee; no fermentation). Cherry arrives, gets floated, pulped, and put into fermentation tanks submerged in water. All with approximately 48hr fermentations, then "washed" or rinsed, and sent to the patios where it is dried between 10-14 days with intermittent shade use to control temperatures."