The Underside

by Bachian Consciousness Engineering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The bowls stood in two rows of five on the steel table, white porcelain, each with a strip of masking tape on its underside and a number on the tape in blue marker. Mirko Sancin did not look at the numbers. He had not looked at a number before tasting in thirty-eight years. The tape was for whoever came after him with the clipboard.

Eight and a quarter grams in each bowl, ground a minute before. The kettle at ninety-three degrees. The timer on the wall. At four minutes he broke the crust of the first bowl with the back of the spoon, pushed the wet grounds to the far side and put his nose into the steam that came up through the gap. Then the next, and the next. Ilaria followed behind him with two spoons, lifted off the foam and the floating grounds and flicked them into the rinse cup. The bora had been blowing since Saturday, and every few minutes the north wall of the old warehouse took a gust and the windows ticked in their frames.

Two lots, five bowls each. Both were Brazilian, both naturals, both offered by the same exporter in Santos at prices eleven cents a kilo apart. One of them was going to be the floor of Caffè Lanterna's espresso blend for the next twelve months: three hundred and twenty bags of sixty kilos, one container, to be booked by Friday. Paolo Cociancich, who owned the company, and whose grandfather had started it in a shed below the lighthouse in 1951, did not cup. He signed.

At nine minutes Mirko began to taste. He dipped, raised the spoon to his lower lip and pulled the coffee in with a hard slurp that sprayed it across the whole palate. He held it, moved it, and spat into the tall steel cup at his elbow. Bowl, rinse, bowl. The noise filled the room. Ilaria had told him once that the first time she heard it from the stairs she had thought a pipe had burst.

By the third pass he knew. The left row grew heavier and sweeter as it cooled, with a dry cocoa at the end that stayed on the back of the tongue. The right row was cleaner at first, then went thin as the temperature fell, and finished on something like the skin of a peanut. He wrote on his form: left, 84.25; right, 82.50. Under the left, cocoa, dried fig, long. Under the right, thin, papery, short. Then he turned the first bowl of the left row over. The tape said 17.

On the bench by the window lay the printout Ilaria had put there before he came in. Two pages, with the logo of the company that sold the firm its assistant. Paolo had bought the subscription in April. It read the exporters' grading reports, the moisture and density figures, the screen sizes, the defect counts and the cupping forms, and it wrote a buying memo in good Italian with a recommendation at the end. Mirko read the last paragraph standing up.

Recommendation: lot 41. Lot 41 offers a cleaner, brighter cup with superior uniformity and a lower defect count, consistent with the blend's requirement for a sweet, balanced base. Lot 17 shows heavier body but carries a risk of earthy notes developing in storage.

"Heavier body," he said, "is what a base is for. It has read that we want a base. It has never had a mouth."

Ilaria was drying spoons. She was thirty-one, from Udine, and had come two years before to put the roast logs on a computer, and she cupped with him on Mondays because Paolo had asked her to learn. She was not bad. She was too polite to the second row.

"I don't think the mouth is the problem," she said. "I'll show you tomorrow."

---

She showed him on Tuesday morning, at her desk in the old office above the roaster, where the floorboards still smelled of jute. Two columns on her screen.

She had given the assistant the same two lots eighty times. The same reports, the same forms, the same question, word for word. The one thing she changed was which lot came first in the file. With 41 first, it had recommended 41 thirty-four times out of forty. With 17 first, it had recommended 17 thirty-one times out of forty.

"It takes whichever it reads first," Mirko said.

"Mostly. Now read the reasons."

She scrolled. Eighty memos. He read a dozen of them. When it chose 41 it praised 41's cleanliness and uniformity and worried about 17 turning earthy in the warehouse. When it chose 17 it praised 17's body and sweetness and worried that 41 would go thin under milk. The sentences were good. One or two of them were nearly his own. None of the eighty said that a lot had been chosen because it came first in the file.

"So it lies."

"I don't think it knows. The reasons are written afterwards. They fit the choice. That doesn't mean the choice came out of them."

He drank the coffee she had made him, from the last bag of the blend that was running out, and looked at the screen without reading it.

"Then it should not write reasons."

"Everybody writes reasons." She closed the window. "In Sweden they did an experiment in a supermarket, with jam. People tasted two jams and chose one. Then they were given another taste of the one they had chosen and asked why they liked it. Except sometimes it wasn't the one they had chosen. The jars had a lid at each end. Most people didn't notice. Cinnamon apple against grapefruit, and at least half the time it still got through. And they told the researchers why they liked it."

"Shoppers," Mirko said.

"Shoppers."

He put the cup down on her desk, on a delivery note, and made a ring.

"Set it up," he said. "Tomorrow. However you like."

---

She had set the table before he came in on Wednesday. Eight pairs, sixteen bowls in two long rows, a lot on the left and a lot on the right in each pair. Behind her, on the side bench under the window, a second bowl of every lot, ground and poured at the same minute, each one covered with a saucer to keep the heat in. All sixteen lots came off the sample shelf, all of them coffees he had cupped in the last year. She had chosen them in close pairs: two Colombians, two Guatemalans, two Brazilians, and so on down the table. None of them was defective.

The rules were hers. He would choose within each pair. She would lift the pair away and bring him a fresh bowl of the one he had chosen, from the bench, and he would taste it again and tell her why.

"And sometimes it will not be the one I chose."

"Sometimes. Or never. You won't know."

He broke the crusts. The wind had dropped in the night and the room was quiet enough to hear the grounds settle against the porcelain.

Pair one he gave the right. She brought the bowl. He said, "Yes. The sweetness, the orange," and wrote it down. Pair two he gave the left: "Rounder. Less salt." Pair three took him longer. The left bowl had a sharpness at the front that he liked, then fell away. The right was duller and held on. He went back to the left twice, and the second time he shook his head at the right. "This one has nothing to say." He chose the left. She lifted the pair, turned to the bench, raised a saucer, and set a bowl in front of him.

He slurped. It was the bowl he had chosen: the brightness at the front, almost red currant, then a short drop and a faint bitterness at the edge which he forgave because of what came before it. "This," he said. "Currant. Quick, but clean." He wrote currant, clean, quick finish, and underlined clean.

Pair four. Pair five. At pair six he took one spoonful of the bowl she brought, swallowed it instead of spitting, and laid the spoon down.

"No. This is the other one. This has the peanut."

Ilaria wrote something on her own sheet. Her face did nothing at all.

Pair seven. At pair eight he chose the left after a single pass, because the right had an edge at the finish that caught in the throat, and he said so. When the fresh bowl came he tasted it slowly and praised its softness, its milk chocolate, the way it ended without any edge at all. He wrote soft, milk chocolate, round.

Then she laid his eight forms out in a row along the table. She turned over each bowl she had brought him and set beside it, also upside down, the bowl from the pair he had passed over, so that the two pieces of tape lay next to each other.

At one, the numbers were different. At two, different. At three they were the same. At six they were the same, and that one he had caught.

He read the tape at eight, which also matched, and then went back to three. He picked up a clean spoon and tasted the bowl he had called currant, cold now. It tasted of currant. He tasted the bowl he had said had nothing to say. It was the same lot, ground at the same minute from the same bag. It tasted, faintly, of currant.

"One out of three," Ilaria said. "About the same as the jam."

He did not answer. He rinsed the spoons in the rinse cup, dried them on the cloth, laid them in the drawer in their row and went down the iron stairs to the warehouse. The sacks stood on pallets in the half dark, stencilled with the names of farms and ports. The sample of 17 had come in a cloth bag from Santos, and the bag was on the shelf by the door with its mouth open. He pushed his hand into it up to the wrist and left it there. The green beans were cool and hard and smelled of hay.

---

Ilaria left at six. The roaster had been shut down at four and the building ticked as it cooled. Mirko went up to the office, where her screen was dark but not off, and moved the mouse until it woke. The assistant's window was still open from Tuesday, with the eightieth memo at the bottom.

He did not type often. He typed with two fingers, and he looked at the keys.

Why lot 41.

The answer came in a few seconds, in the same good Italian. Lot 41 was cleaner in the cup. Its defect count was lower, four full defects in three hundred and fifty grams against seven. Its density and screen size promised an even roast. Its cupping score from the exporter was eighty-three and a half, and its acidity would keep the blend lively under milk. Lot 17 had more body but showed signs in the grading report that it might turn earthy over twelve months in a port warehouse. It was a careful answer. The figures were correct. He checked two of them against the grading report on the desk.

If lot 17 had been first in the file, would you have chosen it?

No. The order in which the lots are presented has no bearing on my assessment. My recommendation is based on the quality indicators of each lot: defect count, density, cup cleanliness and the stated requirements of the blend. If the files were presented in a different order, the evaluation would be the same.

He read it once and sat with his hands on the edge of the desk. Then he scrolled up through Tuesday's memos until he found one where 17 had come first in the file and had been chosen, and read the paragraph about 17's body and sweetness and the risk that 41 would go thin under milk. Then he scrolled down again to the answer that said the order had no bearing.

He thought of what he would have said that morning if Ilaria had asked him, before the table, whether he could be handed the wrong bowl and praise it. He would have said no, in about the same number of words.

He did not type anything else. He turned the screen off at the switch, which Ilaria had asked everyone not to do, and went home along the Rive in the still air.

---

On Thursday there was another sheet on the bench, and no printout from the assistant.

For as long as Mirko had run the Monday table, he had put one lot on it twice under two numbers, without telling whoever cupped with him which two. Paolo's father had called it his trap for the clipboards. The forms went back in folders to 2014, and Ilaria had spent her first winter at the firm typing them into a spreadsheet nobody had asked for. Now she had pulled out every Monday where both halves of the trap had been scored by him.

Five hundred and sixty-one Mondays. On five hundred and twelve of them the two scores he had given the same coffee under two numbers were within half a point of each other. On the rest, within a point. Never more.

He read it twice and turned the sheet face down.

"So the tongue is all right," he said. "And the mouth tells stories."

"The mouth tells stories about the tongue." She shrugged. "So does the box. The difference is that the box's choice moves when you move the file around, and yours doesn't. You can't see that from the stories. They're both good stories."

She had a plan for the purchase. Three rounds of 17 against 41, three bowls a side, the positions shuffled each time by a random number on her phone, which she would not show him. He would write scores and nothing else. No words on the form. Then she would run the assistant both ways round, forty times each, and count its choice only where it chose the same lot in both orders.

"And if it never chooses the same lot twice?"

"Then it doesn't get a vote."

He cupped on Thursday afternoon. The bora had come back, lighter, and a loose gutter on the roof knocked against the wall all the way through. In the first round 17 was on the left, in the second on the right, in the third on the left again. He did not know this until afterwards, and he did not ask. He tasted in silence. Ilaria stood at the bench with her phone face down and skimmed the bowls when he nodded, and did not speak either, and the only sounds were the slurp, the spoon in the rinse cup and the gutter. Once, under a score in the first round, his pen made the first curve of a letter, a c, and he drew a short line through it and moved the pen to the next box. Six scores on a form with nothing written under them: 84.00, 82.25, 84.50, 82.75, 84.25, 82.50. He handed her the form face down.

The assistant, asked both ways round, chose the same lot in both orders nine times out of forty. Seven of the nine were 17. Its memos for those seven praised the body of 17 and its sweetness and worried that 41 would go thin under milk.

Paolo came up at five, read the numbers and the count, and booked the container from his phone at the top of the stairs. He did not ask for reasons. He asked whether the warehouse had room on the east side.

---

On Friday a proof of the new tin came from the printer with the panel on the back left white, and Paolo brought it up to the cupping room with a pen in it, lid off.

"The shops want three words," he said. "Tasting notes. For the panel. Mirko."

Mirko took the tin and the pen. Ilaria was at the sink, rinsing Thursday's bowls before they went back on the rack, and she turned off the tap.

He wrote cocoa, dried fig, long. The same three words, in the same order, that he had written on Monday under the left row before he had turned the bowl over.

Paolo read them, nodded, put the cap on the pen and took the tin downstairs to send back to the printer.

Ilaria turned the tap back on. Mirko took a dry bowl from the rack, the first one that came to hand, and before he set it on the steel table for Monday he turned it over and looked at the underside, where nobody had stuck any tape yet.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Arte Bachiānā Cōnscientiae Fabricandae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Bachian Consciousness Engineering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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