I know I could get in trouble posting about coffee instead of beer so I promise my beer readers that I won’t post too much about this stuff. But, let’s face it coffee has incredibly complex flavors just as good beer does. The quality of coffee can be judged by it’s aroma, fragrance, body, acidity, flavor, etc. Sound familiar? So, if you don’t enjoy drinking a great beer first thing in the morning, maybe coffee is a good breakfast alternative?

Portlanders love to boast about their Stumptown Coffee. The Stumptown Annex in SE Portland offers free tasting sessions every single day at 11:00am and 3:00pm. They require their employees to go to a tasting session at least once a month so that they can asnwer customers questions about varieties and all the new coffee they get in.

We learned how to smell different aromas at different parts of the tasting process. You have to keep your mouth open when you sniff the coffee so that you have greater oxygen flow.

When the coffee cools down you begin tasting it. You can spit it out or else you might get a caffeine high. You taste it a number times as it cools down because the flavor changes as it reaches room temperature.

One of the beans we got to try was one that they are charging $90.00 per pound retail price. Seems a bit pricey but it was my clear favorite. Apparently it’s a super difficult bean to grow and it only grows in very small pockets of the world. Maybe you’ll get to try this one too if you stop in.