Settling In: Hello from Month Two

Zakiya Mason, the NKG PACE Partner in Hoboken, kindly shared these thoughts in late June, when asked how the settling-in process was going.

Zakiya Mason, in the Neumann Gruppe USA Quality Control lab.

It's hard to believe two months have gone by since I arrived in New Jersey from Los Angeles and began my time with the NKG PACE program. In the Hoboken office, which is the headquarters of Neumann Gruppe USA, I have the unique experience of working alongside two coffee importers, InterAmerican Coffee and Rothfos Corporation. Although their goals are aligned — each finds coffees that fit the needs of its respective customers — their individual processes for evaluating and qualifying coffees have apparent differences.

As someone who has worked strictly in specialty coffee for most of my coffee career, I'm more at home with the InterAmerican approach of evaluating coffees. They evaluate coffee based on the SCA's classic scoring system and generally expect it to be free of defects. Rothfos Corporation, on the other hand, is dealing with commercial coffee trading, where the emphasis is on defect count and identifying anything that’s a “non-coffee flavor.”

Over the past two months, I've spent the bulk of my time calibrating my sensory skills in the lab and performing the daily tasks assigned to me. I've also been focused on completing my NKG PACE curriculum, which includes reading about sensory evaluation and performing exercises that test my sensory skills.

One of these is called triangulation; it’s an exercise in which you must identify the different cup in a set of three. Like all coffee tasting, it's best done with other people, so members of both teams have entered the cupping lab to participate in these exercises with me, and all of us have been humbled by it. For one triangulation, I used four fresh arrivals from Kenya. For another, I used four coffees from different regions in Guatemala. As a disclaimer, I may have made the exercises unnecessarily difficult, but if the muscle isn't a little sore afterward, did you really work out?

For each exercise, QC professionals, traders and even a member of the tech team (a former sommelier) participated and found themselves wrecking their brains and their palates to uncover the subtle and nuanced differences in the cups. Performing this exercise together not only gave us a sense of camaraderie but also highlighted the fact that even expert tasters are not perfect instruments. It's nice to be reminded that no matter how long someone has been in coffee, or the heights of their success as a professional (in either commercial or specialty coffee), when we come to the cupping table, we're each there to practice, discover and potentially be surprised. •

Zakiya, during a fun day testing cold brew options.