Stinkers!

So...you go to the store and buy your longtime usual commercial coffee in a can expecting nothing more nor less than what you've ever got from it before. In the wee hours of the morning you drag yourself out of bed the next day, give said can of wakey, wakey a twist of the ol' can opener, make your usual batch of brew and sit down to take that magical first sip. But this time, rather than being "Good to the Last drop," your cup smells like something dead dropped in it when you weren't looking. Thinking it must be a fluke, you pour out the cup and try another...to no avail. It tastes terrible. Risking being late for work, you pour out the whole batch and hope for better tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, and guess what? All is normal. No stink. No bad taste.

You've just experienced a stinker. No, that's not something to be blamed on the dog. It is a very real term used in the coffee industry for beans that are either diseased or rotten but made it through the process and into your cup. A stinker bean usually looks black, shriveled up, and bad. If it gets through the watchful eyes of the pre-roasting staff and into the roast, and then into the grinder, it can pollute a whole can of coffee.

Back in the mid-1990's, before I knew what specialty coffee was, I got a stinker in my can of commercial coffee. It smelled like an old, dirty ashtray and tasted just as bad though I've never tasted one. The coffee was so bad that I had to throw the whole 2 lb. can away.

The specialty coffee industry is susceptible to stinkers just like any other commercial coffee company. We all are at the mercy of the $1 a day coffee workers who are commissioned with the task of sorting through trillions of beans looking for that one stinker. Their task is even more daunting that that of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.