We’re thrilled to be able to welcome to the roastery two of the most curious scientific minds in coffee today, Morten Münchow and Ida Steen!
Morten and I have known each other since 2005 when I helped create the first blend for the roastery where he was just employed as roast master, so I am very excited that his new company CoffeeMind and Square Mile Roasters are now working together on this initial talk and forthcoming series of courses.
Morten has a masters degree in biology and philosophy and has worked as a roaster, teacher and coffee consultant since 2005. He also teaches research design and statistics for students of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, and is currently an external lecturer at the Food Science department of the University of Copenhagen, sponsored by SCAE to incubate and support research on specialty coffee.
Ida has a masters degree in sensory science from the Department of Food Science in Copenhagen. Other than performing laboratory sensory profiling at the university and for industrial companies, she has developed a method to map individual sensory skills. This map gives a very detailed picture of a persons sensory strengths and weaknesses, and becomes a great starting point for an educational process designed to put the weaker sensory skill areas through a steep learning curve.
Since sensory science is heavily based on state of the art statistics, Morten and Ida were quickly able to develop new approaches to methodology that speaks directly into the needs for evidence based practices in the coffee business, or any other business where sensory skills are of importance.
On Wednesday the 30th, they will be here in London to present and discuss their methodology, and inspire you to take a more scientific approach to your quality control program, new product development and possible approaches to judge your own sensory skills. By an introduction to statistics and a brief overview of different sensory methods, they will identify the different biases and sources of random decision that you face as a taster. They will explain the principles behind their innovative sensory training program, and present some quick tools to develop a more evidence based approach to quality control and product development methodologies.
Later on this spring and summer Morten and Ida will return to London to teach a series of in depth classes on sensory science, run under Ida Steen’s PhD research program. With focus on sensory training in coffee but with relevance to many other areas for food and drink, the first of these courses will be held in mid May. The course will focus on your capabilities as a taster in a highly innovative way, so that you will be trained directly based on your strengths and weaknesses, in order to speed up your personal skills.
We hope you will all come along on Wednesday the 30th from 6-8pm here at our roastery to hear more about their work, and get first access to sign up for the course in May! It’s free to attend, so please click here for event information and to register!
