Day 2: All Coca Cola Diet

Well there is a first for everything I guess.  Fittingly for my first COE event, I get my first case of stomach troubles at origin.  I have never gotten sick before, but today I have been incapable of keeping anything down, whatsoever.  I am not sure what I ate last night, but something I ate is causing me grief.  I actually don't feel all that bad, I just can't keep anything down.  I am sipping on a coke again, no ice this time, to see if I can actually keep it down.  We shall see.  Nonetheless, it has kind of put a damper on my enjoyment level today.

We cupped thirty coffees today, the first half of the sixty in total, and will finish up round one tomorrow.  After cupping all of the coffees once, we will then re-cup any coffee receiving a score of 84 points or better, and we are estimating 45 coffees to achieve this score.  So on Thursday, we will be cupping all those coffees in the semi-finals.  After that, the top ten coffees get selected base on our scoring, and we cup those on Friday to declare a champion of for COE El Salvador 2009.  All in all, we are likely to cup 115 samples of coffee this week, which is pretty intense.  On the whole, the coffees have been well received.  I personally have been at the lower end of the scoring curve, and am not too sure what that means to be honest.  Perhaps I still need to find my sea legs here in El Salvador, as I am not used to cupping El Salvadorian coffee.  I am discovering about myself that I do like the Pacamara as a varietal, and enjoy the complex nature to these coffees, including a wide array of flavours.  What is interesting with the jury is the polarization surrounding the pacamara varietal.  People either love them or hate them, there is little in the way of a middle ground.

The international jury assembled in El Salvador for this event is pretty amazing.  It is easy to feel completely unqualified to cup, when in the presence of people who have been in the industry for a long time and who have cupped all over the world.  Having said that, no one wears their experience like a badge, and everyone is very professional and gracious.  So it is a delight to do this work, and it really is work.  Everything in El Salvador has been great, the Consejo is doing an awesome job, Maria Jose is an amazing director and she is so organized.  She is also recently engaged to another fellow Consejo guy, Luis, who is acting director of the Consejo at present.  In short, it has been a great trip so far, despite my recent affliction, which has sidelined me (hopefully only temporarily so) from the rest of the gang.  If you want to stay tuned on a more immediate basis to the jury's status, you can check my twitter stream, where I have been giving quick updates as we progress through the day.