When coffee was first sourced from Indonesian countries and brought to the United States it had to make the voyage deep in the hulls of wooden sailing ships. During the trip across the ocean, the bagged or crated green coffee spent several months in a dark, moist environment, prey to the vagaries of heat, humidity, salt, and ocean air. It was this constant, long-term exposure to the ship's storage conditions, accompanied by a lengthy period of time between harvest and roasting, which caused the coffee to age and change. Like an aged cheese or an aged wine, some of these coffees matured very well and resulted in an unusually good cup of coffee. Others presumably didn't fare so well and ended up tasting more like vinegar than coffee. When coffee began to be shipped more rapidly, aged coffees were for a time forgotten, becoming a lost art. Today, aged coffees have begun to be popular again, but primarily in the narrow avenues of specialty coffee consumption. Aged coffee is not an offering that you frequently see at many retail coffee shops, and based upon our cupping results it is something of an acquired taste.

Our cupping samples included an aged Sumatra Mandheling, a monsooned Java, an aged Sumatra Lintong, and a fresh crop Sumatra Lintong. None of these coffees turned out to be as strange as I expected, and the aged Mandheling and monsooned Java tasted mild to the point of being watery. I picked up a bit of mustiness in the Java, and a hint of lightly toasted bread in the Mandheling, otherwise the only remarkable attribute was a complete and utter lack of acidity. Some of our other cuppers noticed a musty hops flavor in the Java, while several cuppers found mild flavors of hay and wheat in the Mandheling.

The fresh crop Sumatra Lintong was the most exciting sample on the table, but not everyone appreciated that particular brand of excitement. After a few slurps I came to appreciate it, but it seems like a rather challenging coffee. The Lintong's flavor spectrum ranged from bitterness to a tart greenness, and occasionally displayed a bit of black pepper and curing spice. Personally, I picked up flavors of arugala, green peppers, and slightly bitter salad greens.

The aged Lintong had more character than these first two samples, displaying permutations of the flavors found in the fresh crop Lintong. I found it somewhat bitter and astringent, but in an unusually refined way... to really like it and drink it might take some practice. Three or four members of our cupping group really liked this offering while the other four or five disliked it entirely. There was little middle ground in terms of taste preference on this sample.

After the cupping, an assortment of strange, quirky and entirely edible prizes, furnished by our production manager, Kim Kisiolek, were given to everyone with enough coffee tasting acumen to discern between the countries of origin represented on the table and to guess which samples were aged and which one was fresh crop. By the end of the session, everyone went home with a prize and a bit of exposure to one of specialty coffee's more anomalous offerings.