Courtesy / J. Rene Martinez
Julien Langevin, a production roaster at Coffee By Design in Portland, won a national tasters championship in Boston, which qualifies him to go to the worlds in Australia in September.
April 12, 2022
Coffee By Design worker takes top prize in national ‘tasters’ championship
Courtesy photo
Julien Langevin, at right, is shown with the runners-up in the tasting championship in Boston over the weekend.
By Staff
A worker at Coffee By Design in Portland, Julien Langevin, is the country's top coffee taste-tester, after winning the U.S. Tasters Championship held over the weekend during the Specialty Coffee Alliance Expo in Boston.
Nearly 100 competitors faced off in a variety of coffee competitions, and Langevin, a production roaster at Coffee By Design, bested finalists from Texas, California and New York.
Competitors in the taster category test their sensory skills by discerning differences in a “triangulation,” a process in which they taste three cups of coffee labeled A, B and C. Two are identical; the goal is to correctly identify the different cup.
The winner is the competitor with the ability to taste, smell, concentrate and recall, with the most correct answers in the shortest amount of time. Langevin was one of an initial field of 23 competitors from across the country.
Some of the competitors were Q Graders, who are licensed to provide quantitative scores for coffees as part of a program run by the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Coffee Quality Institute, as well as green coffee buyers, noted Langevin.
By contrast, “I am largely self-taught, and only recently returned to working in coffee,” he said.
Langevin worked hard in preparation for the coffee competition.
“Every day for the past two months, I came in early to the roastery, on my own time, to test myself by running eight sets of triangulations,” he said.
He practiced with a variety of Coffee By Design roasts. While on the clock, he also was given opportunities to practice with the company’s head roaster, Travis Spear, and director of operations, Jeremy Rävar.
As a result, Langevin said, he reached a point where he could taste the difference between different processes, and between different farms in the same region and country.
In addition to testing his ability to identify and recall coffees, Langevin ate a bland diet for the last few months to help his palate be able to detect the different notes in the coffees.
Langevin said the competition is designed to be accessible to all competitors, including those from small, individually owned coffee houses as well as much larger, companies, regardless of financial resources.
“We are extremely proud of Julien’s win,” said Coffee By Design co-founder Mary Allen Lindemann. “It's an extremely competitive competition which requires years of training.”
Coffee By Design co-founder Alan Spear said Langevin’s next step is to travel to Australia to compete in the World Cup Tasters at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo in September.
Lindemann and Spear founded Coffee By Design, a certified B Corporation, in 1994. Today it operates three coffeehouses in Portland and one in Freeport, as well as a coffee roastery in Portland selling to nearly 600 wholesale and mail order customers around the world.
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