Today, we feature Belleville Brûlerie, a one and a half year roaster based in the northeastern Parisian neighborhood of Belleville that has been doing pretty great stuff.
I just had my first cupping session in Paris there, and I must say it was quite an experience for several reasons:
The entire thing was conduct in French (though the cupping leader was kind enough to provide some translations). And more than that, the terms used aren't exactly directly translated from the English words used. Instead of acidity, we have attaque (literally, attack); instead of aftertaste, we have longue en bouche (literally, that which is long in the month {which really, is the lingering taste in the mouth}).
We did a pretty interesting cupping of vastly different roast levels here, ranging from the ultra-light-just-past-first-crack to a more developed city+ roast. Basically, there were coffees reminiscent of Tim Wendelboe's amazing Hunkete and those of Counter Culture's lovely Baroida. Needless to say, this was both impressive and pretty awesome.
A point about Kenyan coffee production soon turned into a discussion about Kenyan politics, which eventually turned into the declaration that the concept of washing stations was trop communiste.
Some minor differences - we didn't get to break the crust of the coffees, and we did the cupping in glass cups (small differences).
Back to the language thing - it was really difficult to keep up (at my language level), and I could basically only catch words like fruits rouges, cuir, citron, etc whilst the more subtle points were completely lost of me.
Interesting information tidbit gleaned from the parts of the conversations I got, the Paris office of Firefox has a La Marzocco espresso machine in their engineering department.
In general though, the entire experience was pretty awesome. Belleville Brûlerie is open once a week for public cupping at 1130h on Saturdays (book in advance).
