Just before lockdown, I decide to travel to Colombia at the last minute for a coffee tasting as part of our Coffee for Peace project. I have been invited to serve as head judge of a panel of experienced, articulate tasters. An honor and a pleasure, as I find discussing and interpreting flavor profiles together especially fascinating. The event is held at a beautiful hacienda not too far from Medellín. At the end of coffee day, after some three days of intense smelling and slurping, comes the auction of the very best lots. In the auction room, I find myself in true Colombian pandemonium. In the back about sixty jubilant coffee farmers from quaint villages like Caicedo and Urrao and in front over twenty somewhat perplexed international coffee tasters. And then the auction begins!

The auctioneer quickens his cadence of words. The gradually rising prices whiz through the air like arrows and I hear the cheers of the farmers. My brother Barend and I successfully bid together on some beautiful Coffee for Peace microlots, then suddenly he stands up and announces he is going to sing a song. The room hushes with admiration. The melody of his self-composed acapella dances through the somewhat sultry atmosphere of the auction room. In nine couple and sings, he sings an ode to coffee; from farmer to berry to bean to roaster to barista. "Smell the bush, taste the years, the pickers hands." Euphonic coffee art.

Smell is inseparable from the experience of coffee. When I first smelled flowers in a cup of Panamanian gesha, I immediately fell in love. Emotional memory and also smell are both processed in the limbic system of the brain. One of my earliest memories is from my third birthday. I am sitting on a decorated high chair decorated with fragrant violets. Irresistible. Apparently, I even munched a few petals back then.

It is estimated that our species can tell apart at least a thousand aromas. Naming, however, is another matter. I had no trouble with that gesha in Panama at the time. I smelled it immediately. JASMINE! Lately, I have been taking my dog Rocky on regular nighttime walks. Rocky is a driven sniffer. Any scent can charm him. Sometimes we are stubbornly tugging away. He then wants to sniff around and I just want to go to bed. Smell, that's what I miss most right now. I sniff the scent of spring blossoms, but not that of my fellow man. I cherish the hope that soon it will be allowed again. I long for that moment.

Source: KTC No. 35 - koffietcacao.nl
Illustration Roel Steenbergen