Three Cups of Coffee

No pun intended here.

I’m not in Balti but Chelsea; I don’t need to use body lan­guage but my native lan­guage to talk to my com­pany; I’m here sav­ing no one but my dried-out olfac­tion and gus­ta­tion senses. I’m sit­ting in Cafe Grumpy.

Cafe Grumpy, my favorite cof­fee hide out.

Unlike other days here, today, Angie and Nikkie join me in this cof­fee hide out on Sat­ur­day after­noon. I’m super hyper about their com­pany  — not that they are nec­es­sar­ily adorable peo­ple, it’s their cof­fee choices — two extra cups to taste! With their gen­er­ous shar­ing (offer­ing?) of their cups, I could taste three dif­fer­ent cof­fees from three dif­fer­ent coun­tries in just a few min­utes. Usu­ally I come up here to fin­ish my healthy dose of daily tabloids in the time I fin­ished one cup as it cools, but today is a lit­tle special.

They have no prob­lem let­ting me sniff and sip their cups because they are gen­er­ous and know my crav­ing for cof­fee bet­ter than any­one. Hence, I was tast­ing, rins­ing, back to tast­ing, rins­ing again… rounds after rounds. Our three cups are Flor Azul from Nicaragua, roasted by Intel­li­gentsia, a Kenyan brew roasted by Novo and El Pro­greso from Guatemala, Roasted by Cafe Grumpy them­selves. The sparkling acid­ity of Kenya and Flor Azul’s gen­tle bal­ance of acid­ity and sweet­ness are as expected. El Pro­greso has the heav­i­est body and funky taste which I can’t quite describe.

Tast­ing three kinds of cof­fee is a fan­tas­tic taste sen­sa­tion, hardly com­pared to except when cup­ping. If this was three cups of espresso, they can wear out your taste buds. With the first cup you’re in cof­fee heaven, but the sec­ond and third cups don’t add to the expe­ri­ence, it’s great but going nowhere. Three cups of var­i­ous beans, from west hemi­sphere to Africa, is like run­ning into one sur­prise after another, if not a mind-blowing dis­cov­ery. You can explore the cof­fee land­scape; see the tran­quil lake, smell the flow­ers bloom­ing, and real­ize all the details of heaven found in each cof­fee. The limit is set by your taste sen­sa­tions only.