ARTIST NO.30 KAPUT

Well hello to our special 30th edition art bag. For over a decade, we’ve supported 30 different artists on these coffee bags, and made café shelves and kitchen counters better for it. Thanks to everyone involved! For the big tricenarian, we’ve sniffed out a wicked artist from the streets of Brisbane, known as Kaput. Coincidentally, Kaput only started drinking coffee at age 30. And after a visit to the tasting room at Single O Newstead, he’s illustrated something close to our hearts, noses and palettes – cupping coffee. An eye-popping beauty, hey? Or in coffee terms we might say, this art has vibrant acidity, complex sweetness, and a lasting finish. As Kaput discovered, cupping is a distinct practice used by coffee folk to evaluate quality, inform roast and dive nose first into coffee’s attributes. On the one hand, cupping is loud. Think of whirring grinders, followed by humans slurping coffee off spoons with such gusto, it sounds like Whip Bird cracks. Then at times, it’s just the quiet of cuppers deep in mind-taste connection, making mental or physical notes on a coffee’s expression of its 1000 or so flavour compounds. These aren’t notes like ‘man serious taste rainbows and tongue raving here!’ but notes that adhere to specialty coffee’s Coffee Tasters Flavor Wheel, which includes flavours ranging from ‘almond’ and ‘apple’ to ‘whiskey’ and ‘winey’ and around 50 flavours in between. This epic wheel documents the taste depths in coffee and grounds us with a common language. As for taste preference? Well that there is subjective. What we like to say is, so long as it’s quality, find whatever floats your boat, blows your mind, and has you seeing taste rainbows. Thanks Kaput for a cracker.