How do we tell if the person is lying? - or mistaken - or has different tastes than I? - buy the coffee and try it. Or, you can always just stick with what you know you like.
A little over a year ago I liked *bucks pretty well. It's hard to deny that the aroma in one of their stores is pretty intoxicating. But I've since become hooked on my own roasts of a wide variety of coffees.
I would never have guessed that I'd fall for a coffee description that includes "funky" and yet it would be hard to deny that the current blend I'm drinking of Yemen and monsooned Bali is funky. It's also chocolatey of course and there's something else there that I can't quite put my finger on. You'd never say that of any other coffee I can buy in my community. I pay attention to the descriptions. They influence my buying decisions. And, even though I seldom find all the nuances in the descriptions, I almost always enjoy the coffee.

Marshall wrote:If a coffee reminds you of "Moroccan leather" and "El Dorado plums" and you say so, you're not lying.

SlowRain wrote:How do we verify if the person is speaking the truth or a lie?

About taste, that is. It's not that mysterious; but it does illustrate how slippery the transition from cupping room to marketing copy can be.

If I'm in a cupping room, and somebody says, "did you catch that Moroccan leather taste?" it's like somebody pointing a finger at a nearby tree. Everyone in the room is tasting the same thing, and when somebody calls the chewy, slightly astringent, not much flavor taste element "Moroccan leather," they presumably like that taste. If they had said "hidey" or "cardboard," they probably didn't. There's really no mystery about any flavor descriptor if people are together, tasting something they know well, and are used to describing it. The labels are just make do words that point out taste features which are obvious to everyone there, so they can discuss them in detail.

When a marketing person is sitting in on the cupping, and the descriptors that were being tossed around end up as copy, is that a lie? Not really, but it can be problematic. The people drinking the coffee won't be in the same room, they won't have prepped it the same way, and they may not have the same experiences and descriptions (different cupping rooms have different tasting dialects). But the problem goes away if the seller uses descriptions consistently, so that "Moroccan leather" always points to the the same taste feature whenever it is used. Then repeat buyers will be able to buy coffees according to whatever descriptors they previously liked, even if they think what's called Moroccan leather actually tastes like duck soup.

Finally, dragging out lame generalities about subjectivity and objectivity every time taste is discussed neither helps the discussion, nor does it bind the poster's knowledge in Moroccan leather.

Some things should be taken with the same sense of humor with which they're offered. Just sayin' is all.

BDL

Psyd wrote:The imagery is a lie (like quite a bit of marketing) and every time the lie is discovered, a bit of trust is lost, and a bit of resentment builds up.

... Or if you have less pretense regarding your own tasting and coffee preparation prowess, you write off your failure to pick up on a certain flavor descriptor as a difference in prep, environment, or your own palate. Creative descriptions of coffee may be a lie, or they may just be creative descriptions of coffee. In my experience, most of the time that I taste coffees I can at least have an idea of where someone was coming from with their descriptions. I say give a little credit, try to be more creative about your own tasting process, and for god's sake, lighten up. Drinking coffee critically is about enjoying some small part of life, not about hating on people who approach things differently than you would. If you're trying a coffee that's been described ornately and it tastes like rotting fish, then there's a beef to be had, but if someone says "Sicilian blood oranges" and I got "sweet citrus and dark red berry flavors," I'm pretty happy. That's one of the things I enjoy about getting coffee from a good source.

When I was in Norway last month, we cupped 5 different coffees blind from a variety of Norwegian roasters, all of whom had posted flavor descriptions in Norwegian, which I couldn't properly read but which I could pull the highlights from after 10 days or so of reading translated Norwegian menus at restaurants. We were able to match each coffee to the right bag based on the taste descriptions that I could understand. These were wordy and clearly detailed descriptions of flavors that were no doubt conceived creatively. But they obviously weren't "lost in translation." I find that amazing in many ways. It's one of the things that I love about coffee tasting. I regard it as part of how I learn to be a better taster.

Do I still get mad when someone sells me a coffee that tastes like, let's say, candied peanuts and chocolate truffle, and I find it tastes like rotten peanuts and blow-torched cocoa powder? Yes. But I prefer to be able to counter the marketing "lie" with an equally creative "truth" of my own rather than write off all such descriptions as categorically the work of an inbred class of cretins whose only goal is to squeeze my wallet by duping me into thinking I'm buying something good when it's really just commodity crap. Life's too short for such cynicism, to me.

Marshall wrote:"Him?" "Us?" "Hate?" "Lies?"

Is poetry also illegal in Arizona now?

Nope. I'm just gonna guess that you've never read any Douglas Adams, and you entirely misconstrued the tone of my post. BDL gets it.
The lie is when the descriptors are selling a coffee that doesn't exist, or doesn't resemble what comes in the mail to *any* degree. Exaggeration I can deal with; enthusiasm, even stretching the truth a bit. But in coffee, as in other areas (imagine the pictures of food you see in the fast food ads compare to what you would get if you actually ordered the item), it doesn't take too long for a mis-representation of the wonderfulness of a roaster's product to develop into a mistrust for *any* of the roaster's product.
Was bein' my point.

If that was your intention, I thought it wasn't expressed in an easily appreciable way (FWIW).

To whit, given what you've said, I'm unsure of the source of your thoughts. It sounds like some kind of "domino theory" of the ills of marketing, Are you expressing a fear that roasters will someday turn to such cynical marketing where the advertisement is wholly disconnected from the product, or do you think this is a present issue that particular roasters are 'perpetrating?' Or something else entirely?

Psyd wrote:Nope. I'm just gonna guess that you've never read any Douglas Adams, and you entirely misconstrued the tone of my post.

Well, that's the risk of making judgments about people you've never met. Not only have I read the whole Hitchhiker's Trilogy, I've listened to the entire radio version, seen all the BBC TV episodes and even sat through the very disappointing movie.

Posts have "tones" and they also have words. Your words included calling a roaster's descriptions "lies," when you had no basis for doing so, at least no basis that was rooted in your experience of the particular coffee or your knowledge of the roaster's integrity. I suppose there is a market of consumers who would like all advertising to be converted to spec sheets, but if they had their way, we wouldn't have any of these, would we?

"I suppose there is a market of consumers who would like all advertising to be converted to spec sheets".

Absolutely, I'm one of them. Not necessarily when it comes to fine foods and beverages but when it comes to necessities I sure think this country, the USA, would be much better off if there was more control over truth in advertising.

As a marketeer by trade, I can see a few issues here that go to the heart of the problems that many companies face, in terms of marketing communication. I guess the most obvious are: Who are our customers?; What do they like and not like? etc.

The original post refers to a commentator who has views of his own. It seems to him as though changing, or messing with the morning cup of Joe is bad (un-American). Is he saying this because he wants to appear to be a man of the people, or because he genuinely feels that figurative descriptions have no place in a discussion of coffee. Or worse still, that they're pretentious.

That the comments are being made in the first place, stands testament to the fact that change is happening. This discussion would not have happened 20 years ago. But as with all new ideas, there comes a point when they emerge into the mainstream to challenge the status quo. The old saw: first you ignore us; then you laugh at us; then you fight us; then we win; could easily apply in this circumstance.

Clearly (this is where I use a marketing word) the potential market can be segmented. Fundamentally there are those who have experienced great coffee and those who have not. Yet even within the group that takes its coffee very seriously there is a dissonance that is reflected in the original author's comments. To what degree should we accept the marketing communication from speciality roasters?

Who are our customers and what are we trying to sell them? In this case it's not coffee. It's first and foremost a better experience; it's a moment of truth. Now that, I believe, is an easy pitch in a side by side comparison between speciality coffee and truck stop drip. But having been sold on a better way there is still the need to create a moment of truth. What I believe we have been getting is a fairly major deviation from that.

Roasters, I believe, need to stop with the hyperbole. OK, so you can taste Sumatran dragon fruit on the nose, after you've run it through a $10,000 machine - that's great but it's not me. If your commercial customers are also so equipped with equivalent hardware, then that's fantastic. But if many of your consumers are of more modest means, then they have n't a hope in hell of tasting such rarefied delicacies. So why in God's name are you talking to them as if they did. The moment of truth is when expectation is matched by reality.

I think change is here, or at least arriving shortly. Many more individuals will start to demand better coffee. Suppliers of better coffee could better avail themselves of this growing minority, by understanding that the early adopters have arrived already and now it's the turn of the early majority, who need less hyperbole and more prosaic communication.

Jonathan Gold, the "commentator" in question is a humorist as well as a restaurant critic specializing in the sorts of joints which don't get reviews -- "dives." He's best known for a column called "Counter Culture" which ran in the L.A. Weekly. His reviews were and are very influential not only regarding specific restaurants but also in consciousness raising -- and not just in SoCal either. Without some feeling for Gold, the cited column can't be understood in the way it was intended.

Not that both aren't funny to a misanthropic observer, but there's a difference between affected high dudgeon and genuine hysteria. Gold's article was a play on the first, while some [no names named] of the reaction in this thread is purely the second.

BDL