National Husband Eddie Peng Shows Up for Coffee Again!! Hu Zhengyuan Teacher Hu's Cupping Session

Amazing! Eddie Peng's Cupping Session Goes Viral — Cool People Are Drinking Coffee!

Originally published 2017-12-21 · Coffee Workshop

Today, Eddie Peng is once again flooding our social media feeds — because our national husband went to Teacher Hu Yuanzheng (Jake) for a cupping session. Cool people really are all drinking coffee now!

Jake himself:

This man looks cool even while cupping, has a deep understanding of specialty coffee, and even the questions he asks are thoroughly professional — he can casually drop descriptors like apricot and dried prune. He is genuinely an impressive pour-over master!

Eddie Peng's connection to specialty coffee is completely natural — he genuinely loves it.

And he doesn't just love drinking coffee — he has fallen in love with the brewing process too. Just look at that focused face.

Now the coffee world can finally make the trending topics, haha~~

Coffee Master Hu Yuanzheng

After perfecting his craft to the extreme, the whole industry now knows his name.

The Three Sources of Coffee Knowledge

From the day he entered the industry until now, Jake says, every bit of coffee knowledge he has learned comes from no more than three sources: what others directly taught him, materials and books, and what he taught himself.

Learning from Others

The first source includes his teachers, employees, students, friends, competitors, judges — even people he doesn't admire. Learning through these interactions is often colored by emotion: when he likes or admires someone, he tends to believe everything they say without examining it rationally; conversely, when he doesn't, he doubts everything he hears and refuses to accept even reasonable arguments. Often it takes reflection afterward to actually absorb the lesson.

This isn't about saving face, but it is still a problem. Especially since his memory isn't great — he often can't recall the main points of a conversation, and all that remains is his impression of whether he liked the person. And that impression may have been deliberately crafted by others or distorted by himself, which makes it completely unreliable. These days he is gradually learning to weigh the reasoning behind people's arguments and the motivations behind their behavior — and in front of the people he completely trusts, he happily regresses to a child, going entirely on intuition.

Learning from Materials

The second source is reading — something he used to excel at, though he now lacks patience. An article often gets interrupted four or five times by other information. Unless he immediately recognizes a material's value, he will put down his phone (yes, he has to print things out), take off his glasses (yes, he has presbyopia), and read and think properly. Materials that survive that filter usually answer questions he has carried in his head for a long time, or propose genuinely new topics and concepts. He will examine the logic of the preface and conclusion repeatedly, cross-reference other literature, and even run practice tests to verify.

That kind of study is incredibly interesting — no people involved, just talking to himself, bluntly questioning and cross-checking over and over. The one misfortune is that he can't ask the author his follow-up questions directly; mostly he has to answer his own.

Self-Learning

The third source is self-learning — a process of asking and answering his own questions. Problems arrive from every direction: asked by others, unresolved by reading, or thrown at him by work, the roaster, or the green beans. His habit is to frame the problem properly first, because a well-posed question is much easier to answer and judge. He also breaks big problems into small ones; solve the small ones one by one, and the big answer isn't far away. Then he simulates the experiments in his mind, imagining the possible outcome of each step, before finally doing the actual practice. It's a habit from his student days: experiments cost money, so thinking through the logic and likely answers in advance makes verification more efficient — and cheaper.

Answers from self-learning are often the most authentic, and also often completely wrong. Because he is honest with himself, the results are honest; if he hides from himself, he will deceive himself thoroughly. It all depends on whether he has enough wisdom to face himself.

Current Approach

Today he uses all three methods, with preferences and practical constraints deciding the mix. But honestly, he doesn't much like interacting with people — what he loves most is running experiments. As a business owner, though, he has no choice: everything must prioritize the company's survival. And then, simply being able to satisfy his own questions — that already makes him very happy.

Looking Forward to 2018!

Want to cup with Eddie Peng? The cupping spoons are ready...

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Reading about a professional who flavors like apricot and dried prune, you may wonder how to train your own palate. The answer is simply to brew more — and the right dripper makes the practice more rewarding. The Hario V60 was designed by a Tokyo glassware company founded in 1921 and redesigned in 2004 into the form we know today, named for its distinctive 60-degree cone and V shape. The cone and single large outlet extend the contact between water and grounds and hand the flow speed entirely to the brewer, which is exactly what lets a pour-over reveal layered florals and lively fruit acidity.

For a bean worth practicing on, FrontStreet Coffee's washed Yirgacheffe Guodingding is a classic first stop: bright citrus, berry, and jasmine florals with a green-tea-like sweet finish — and unlike the "sour coffee" many beginners fear, a good Yirgacheffe's acidity is soft and fruity rather than sharp. For something fruitier, FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopia Huakui bursts with tropical fruit — strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit, even lychee — with obvious sweetness and almost no bitterness, the coffee many people describe as "the least coffee-like coffee."

And if, like Eddie Peng, you love to talk descriptors, few beans give you more to say than FrontStreet Coffee's Kenya Cherry Tomato: a washed Kenya from the Thika region, grown at 1550-1750 meters from SL28 and SL34 varieties, fermented with Kenya's classic 72-hour double-washed process and roasted light. Expect clear cherry-tomato and dark-plum acidity, a juiciness like fresh-squeezed fruit, middle-palate sweetness of snow pear and black plum, and a long finish of yellow sugar and faint green tea.