Hmmm - good idea, and I like the term "flavor vision"! The trick is, 
do you blend for consistency, or to make the best blend possible in 
terms of fulcilling your idea: I say it is the later ... or more 
specifically, I think the later is more important than the former, or 
you will just end up with an average cup. So the v 3.7 etc makes a 
lot of sense. But where do we start? You know, I though Peets had 
tried to marry color and shapes to blends, but when I tried to figure 
out there "system" it seemed to be pure ornament. Check it out on 
their web site... its a bit hard to find, lemme see, i think the url 
is, oh yeah, coffee.com (joke)
tom
Tom
Douglas Strait wrote "I think it a rather challenging enterprise to 
maintain a flavor vision..."
The phrase "flavor vision" reminded me of an idea I was entertaining 
yesterday. I think Douglas meant it in a different sense and I don't 
mean to change the subject of his post...whether my idea is even 
original I really don't know, but bear with me.
I think it would be interesting to represent coffee flavor profiles 
graphically with color, where the flavor of coffees would be 
represented by, say, a rectangle or oval. Filling out the inside of 
these shapes would be colors and shapes that might resemble something 
like national flags. For example, my graphical representation of the 
Kenya lot 405 would look something like two medium-brown-colored 
blocks bisected by a golden stripe; the challenge is to apply visual 
imagery to your sense of taste. To me the Kenya 405 tastes even and 
"brown" with a middle segment of lighter (golden) character. If there 
were a chocolatey undercurrent, the flag might have a horizontal 
stripe running along the bottom. The flavors of the Harar Lot 30 
might equate to a gradual left-to-right fade from dark geyish-brown 
to blue or lavender. See what I mean?
Am I totally of my rocker or does this seem like it might be a fun 
(if highly subjective & completely pointless) exercise?
TO in VA
On 7/21/06, Douglas Strait 
<dougstrait> wrote:
I am a fan of several of the SM blends. I have been buying Tom's Moka
Kadir blend almost from the start of my homeroasting and more recently
have also come to appreciate the Puro Scuro blend. I think it a rather
challenging enterprise to maintain a flavor vision [an oxymoron if I
ever hear, saw, tasted? one] of a specific flavor profile as your
blending feedstock coffees vary over time. I do chuckle a bit when I
see that Tom's cupping reviews for these two blends have remained
unchanged for years even though surely what is being shipped has none
of the specific lots of blending components that he cupped. What I
think would be a nice addition to the descriptions of these blends
would be the addition of a Version number that would be incremented
each time the source of one of the major blending constituents
changes, e.g., Moka Kadir Ver 37.