What was your personal favorite part or experience?
I really love the smelling aspect of it and observing how different people love and describe different scents. To me its the most interesting part as a coffee roaster is how the end consumer or coffee lovers actually perceive different notes. We all for example, in the coffee industry all agree that vial 12 is the coffee blossom and how people perceive it is based on their own background and childhood. For me, it was interesting to see how perspective across the world, ethnic background, and cultures describe something we all in the coffee industry describe it as the coffee blossom - that was the very interesting part.![Media](https://images.ctfassets.net/vhts96p7twn6/4eiurRJaXbdHG7vGf4cxpj/056077df113550f1379c62a36262081b/mehmet-use.jpg?w=2400&h=1600&fl=progressive&q=100&fm=jpg)
What was your main takeaway for the students?
I think the main takeaway for the student is that coffee is more complex than they think. We think of coffee as a coffee taste but it is actually more complex than wine based on compounds. Coffee has a myriad of different flavors from the traditional, chocolatey, nutty, to the sweet, the floral, and the fruity. The first exercise I'm smelling is that actually coffee can smell anything from a very fruity, very sugar browning, nutty, spices, or some wood, or even dirt or earthy or some negative stuff. I think it is very eye opening for the students to actually see that coffee is not just a coffee taste but it can have much broader spectrum of flavors later on in their culinary journey.Why is it important to educate and show the origin of coffee?
Because you don't know what you don't know, basically. The origin of the coffee determines the flavor of it. I focus a lot on showcasing on what they call in wine - terrior. In what just the farm and farmer have created thanks to the weather, rainfall, soil, or in virtually any given product like coffee or cacao is another very good example. And so showcasing what the flavor of something is without adding anything can help us appreciate it and approach it in a very different way than how we traditionally approached it. For example, coffee was more on the darker side because we didn't know any better back in the days. Once again, we don't know what we don't know so education is very important.![Mehmet and Andrew at Big Island Coffee Roasters](https://images.ctfassets.net/vhts96p7twn6/1SdhQ4dCRkB1gSk09cBhwO/e7f08e6cab6ab224e733f2a9f08b98fa/mehmet-with-andrew.jpg?w=2088&h=1284&fl=progressive&q=100&fm=jpg)