Mehmet Sogan Recaps His Pono Collective Hawai'i Education Experience

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.

What kind of impact would you like to leave with the culinary students?

I really love the Pono Collective approach because I try a lot to bring the coffee people into the culinary aspect of it. I love that the Pono Collective brings the culinary students into coffee. It's a very good way to do it. We in the coffee industry, should integrate specialty coffee and coffee as a culinary ingredient rather than coffee as itself. I like to actually share the different approach between food science and the culinary aspect and what we know about coffee. At the end of the day coffee is an agricultural product, it's part of the same thing as a cucumber or tomato - it's just another agricultural product that we apply heat to. That's why I love the approach with Pono Collective and my participation is to help taste and describe to give lesson and context about coffee and how to integrate with food later on. I did a lot of research on food pairing which works exactly the same as wine pairing but you take out the wine and replace with coffee - almost.