Toby’s Estate has announced Peter Giuliano of the United States as its November Knowledge Talks guest speaker.
Peter, Former Counter Culture Coffee Director, Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s Director of Research and Sustainability, Board Member for World Coffee Events and Co-creator of Re:co, will bring his years of experience from the US to Australia.
Peter will share his knowledge on World Coffee Research’s (WCR) sensory lexicon, Specialty Coffee Association of America’s (SCAA) revised coffee flavour wheel, and the importance of science and research in coffee.
“Though people drink coffee for its warmth or for its caffeine, great coffee is essentially about flavour. The miracle of specialty coffee is the kaleidoscopic flavours that exist within it. To experience specialty coffee is to experience these flavours,” Peter says.
“The quality of a coffee is tied to the existence of certain desirable flavours, as well as the absence of distasteful ones. All this makes the study of coffee flavour, and the realm of sensory science, of critical importance to the coffee person.”
When developing new coffee varieties, processing techniques, roasting styles, or brewing devices, Peter says its critical to evaluate and measure coffee flavour in order to know whether we are making improvements or taking away from the “delicious flavours” in a coffee. That’s where science comes into it: to aid our understanding of coffee flavours, to identify what’s possible in coffee, and to develop a common language of coffee descriptions.
In sensory science, there is an emergent technique for evaluating flavour called sensory descriptive analysis. This technique is used by food scientists to evaluate, measure, and replicate flavours. According to Peter, it has only been in the past few years that sensory descriptive analysis has been used in the realm of coffee development. As such, WCR set out to improve the coffee varieties available to coffee farmers. It used the sensory descriptive analysis to develop a lexicon – a language of flavour – specifically for coffee, a process that took more than two years to develop.
“[It] is changing the landscape of coffee tasting. After partnering with WCR on the development of this lexicon, the SCAA knew that this important scientific work should lead to an update of our most important coffee tasting tool, the Coffee Tasters Flavour Wheel,” Peter says. “As such, in 2016, SCAA and WCR set forth collaboratively to use more research to develop the brand new flavour wheel for coffee.”
Hear more about this development at the Toby’s Estate’s November Knowledge Talks sessions.
The East Coast tour dates are as follows:
Sydney: Monday, 7 November at Toby’s Estate Warehouse, 4/29 – 33 Bourke Road, Alexandria.
Brisbane: Tuesday, 8 November at Newstead Brewing Co, 85 Doggett Street, Newstead.
Melbourne: Wednesday 9 November at Toby’s Estate, 325 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.
Tasmania: Thursday 10 November, Shambles Brewery, 222 Elizabeth Street, Hobart
Each event will commence at 6pm and conclude around 8pm.
Tickets to the event cost $35. To book your place, click here http://bit.ly/2edQNo0
All proceeds from the ticket sales will be donated to the Las Nubes Daycare and Afterschool-Learning Centre. The centre supports the education of over 40 children aged between three and 12 in the coffee community of Acatenango. For further information visit: www.lasnubesguate.com/home.html
Throughout the year Toby’s Estate has invited industry icons to Australia to participate in the educational talks, including Acaia President Rex Tseng, Scace Device inventor Gregory Scace, former International Coffee Organisation Head of Operations Mauricio Galindo, and now SCAA’s Peter Giuliano.
“The purpose of Knowledge Talks isn’t necessarily to just inject the latest information into our coffee scene,” Toby’s Estate Managing Director Cosimo Libardo says. “Rather, it’s to pose thought provoking questions which we can then run with, challenge and explore new ideas and concepts around the latest trends.”