I recently had the pleasure of teaching a group of Korean Buddhist monks a weeks worth of coffee classes to help them improve upon the coffee that they were making at the Bongeun-Sa temple in Seoul. Forgive my ignorance but I was unaware that monks were able to drink coffee but it turns out that monks were among some of the first coffee enthusiasts. They used coffee as a resource to maintain focus and stay awake during long sessions of meditation, which is not dissimilar to today’s use of caffeine to stay awake. Strict dietary restrictions prevent monks from eating rich or spicy food, but coffee is a seed that comes from fruit and therefore it is deemed acceptable.
Although I may be generalizing from a small sample size of 4, but monks make for great coffee students. They are attentive and see value in the most minute details that can help to make a better cup of coffee, which is important considering that hand drip methods are very susceptible to error. A welcome surprise came when I noticed how well that they could taste. The monks were amazingly accurate in their assessments of different coffees and quickly realized the importance of creating regiment to be able to produce the same profiles that they had tasted previously. Perhaps the monk’s restricted diet factors into their ability to taste?
The class used my coffee equipment for a full workweek and let them experiment with how the same coffees taste when prepared different ways. It took recording our opinions of different coffees to notice that coffees that we had opened days previous were no longer as good as when we first opened the bag. They also learned the importance of the digital scale in order to measure the amount of coffee, and the amount of water that they used to brew. I had the monks attempt to eyeball the amounts of coffee and water that they were using and record the weight. We brewed the incorrect ratios in order to see the differences in flavour and recorded the results. Turns out that science wins.
By the end of the week my entire class was obsessed with temperature. I had them record each of their brews using a very accurate FLUKE thermometer. Hand drip methods like a pour-over cone lose a lot of heat and when we brew it is very important to have the temperature of the brew to hover around 196F-201F. This doesn’t mean the temperature of the water that is poured over the coffee, but rather the temperature of the mixture that is created once the hot water and the coffee are combined. Some brew methods call for a series of short pours over the ground coffee, which is an aesthetic that the monks had seen and wanted to use because it looks very involved and complicated. I later showed them that a series of short pours loses a lot of heat which helps explain the sour tastes that they were experiencing. Temperatures that are too hot produce bitterness, whereas cool temperatures produce sour.
Teaching is a mutual relationship and having such attentive students helps to reinvigorate and validate some of the efforts that I’ve made to achieve better coffee. It’s nice to know that the small details are not lost on everyone. What seems like hypercritical nitpicking to some, the monks found to be focused and precise. A perfect week.
