White Rooms or Sample Rooms?
Specialty Coffee is no stranger to New Stuff and Things. New equipment, new techniques, new technologies, varieties, processes. Our attention for the new provides fertile ground for innovation and experimentation to take root and grow.
Ultimately though, these new things need to bear fruit. They need to make coffee and coffee processes better, faster, easier. They need to be practical and they need to work. New Stuff and Things in specialty coffee doesn’t exist only on social media, industry publications, and websites. New Coffee Stuff and Things exist in Roasting Rooms, Sample Rooms, and Tasting Rooms. Places where real work happens. Where real coffee exists. Where real minutes pass and need to be applied to A or to B, where important things get put off and skipped for lack of time, and where real paper stacks up and needs to be dealt with when it does.
As we in Specialty Coffee get more interested in all things Science, and all things Science get more interested in Specialty Coffee, we see a proliferation of whiteroom solutions. These are the sorts of things that appear to work in theory, but that make you shake your head and roll your eyes or even shudder at the thought of actually applying them. Things that make you wonder if their creators have experienced what it is to work with real coffee in real coffee environments.
This is one of the things that makes the Cafe Imports Coffee Rose so special. We built it to solve real problems and to fit into and improve real Sample Rooms. The dueling mandates behind the Coffee Rose were to enrich our notation and communication while also improving the efficiency of our sampling and cupping programs. Usually advancement in one of these requires retreat in the other. Fancy and complicated cupping forms come with massive, costly learning curves and then eat up even more time as you try to use them. Streamlined forms can claw tons of time back, but they often pay for it with limited output capabilities. God forbid you find yourself with a form that offers the worst of both.
In contrast, the Coffee Rose offers a short learning curve (12 - 16 dedicated hours) for a high level of fluency and just a few flights to get comfortable. Once comfortable, cuppers can cup tables of 10 in as little as 10 minutes (after coffees come to temp of course!). At the same time, it provides expansive descriptive output and descriptor level resolution. You only need to describe what you taste, and you’re able to describe those experiences exactly. Far from being a white room project, The Coffee Rose was built in a real Sample Room with its dual mandates of exceptionally fast sample turnaround and highly detailed and accurate sample assessment.
Learn more here.
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