Prahan Market: Coffee cupping and portabello mushroom burgers

Every Saturday, the Market Lane Coffee place at Prahan Market offers a free coffee cupping with 5 different roastings. We arrived just in time, the Prahan Market is on the other side of town and the tasting starts around 10am. The cups were already set up in the tiny tasting room, there were 2 sample cups for each coffee on a beautiful wooden table. Anthony followed us through the tasting and started grinding the beans. He then poured hot water in all cups and then it was time to wait for 3-5 minutes to extract the coffee.

After the little wait, it was time to break the cups! Basically, you stir a bit on the surface on the cup which triggers that a lot of flavor particles are dispensed into the air. That’s the time to sniff the coffee! Afterwards, the remaining solid particles are cleared of the surface and the tasting can begin. With good coffee the flavor gets more intense the closer the liquid is to room temperature. So after brewing, the perfect tasting window is between 12 and 35 minutes. Which leaves lots of time to taste, compare, and taste again.

It turned out that this time the selection was well-balanced. It was hard for us beginners to taste major differences between the different roasts. All of them had a very high acidity and we tasted a bit of earthy to fruity aromas. One of them reminded me also of tobacco, luckily only from the smell. It was lots of fun.

After the tasting, we went to the barbecue outside to get one of their famous portabello mushroom burgers (8$). And they were super delicious! You get a large mushroom cap topped with grated Parmesan, spicy sauce, and raw onions in a roll.

Picture gallery