James Hoffmann is cooking up another big ole coffee cupping. The World Barista Championship, author, popular YouTuber, co-founder of Square Mile Coffee, and multi-time Sprudgie Award winner is putting together another global coffee cupping event, and the theme this year is fermentation. And he’s looking for coffee roasters from around the world who want to take part.
Building off the success of last year’s cupping, that centered around decaffeination processes, which sold something like 30,000 tasting kits worldwide, Hoffmann is taking a similar tack but this time exploring the effects of fermentation. Titled The Fermentation Project, Hoffmann is collaborating with Lucia Solis, a renowned expert on green coffee and fermentation and a member of the 2021 Sprudge Twenty cohort.
For the project, Solis has taken a single lot of coffee from Guatemala and broken it into four micro-lots, each undergoing a different fermentation process. As Hoffmann notes in the video, the purpose of the tasting is to learn more about the fundamentals of fermentation, so the processes these coffees undergo aren’t going to be “weird and wacky” experimental or co-ferments.
This year, the four lots will be offered in half-bag increments, allowing for even more roasters to take part than last year. The exact pricing and detailed information on the different fermentation processes have not yet been made public. The live global cupping is tentatively planned for the end of June or early July.
But for now, Hoffmann is looking for roasters to join. That’s why he’s asking interested coffee roasters from around the world to sign up for The Fermentation Project newsletter to learn more about this year’s event. Signing up for the newsletter is not an obligation to participate, simply an agreement to let Hoffmann email you with more information. So if you want to be part of one of the largest coffee tastings in the history of the world, sign up for the newsletter to learn more.
For more information, visit The Fermentation Project’s official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
