Not many people visualize a glowing lemon at the bottom of a swamp when they sip their Burundi coffee, nor do they visualize smurfs and the color purple when they taste Ethiopian Harrar.

But in Champaign, Alex Kunzelman does.

“Basically, it’s my way of figuring coffee out,” he said. “However you taste things, whatever you can use to engage your taste buds, whatever image, whatever comes to mind, use it.”

Kunzelman said Columbia Street Roastery has been roasting for about 10 years, and supplies local businesses like Howbowda Bagel, as well as the University itself.

Kunzelman led the Coffee Club on a tour of the roastery Saturday, rounded out with a coffee sampling.

The Coffee Club is a registered student organization at the University with the goals of appreciating coffee and educating the public about it. They attend events like the Columbia Street Roastery tour and will hold their Coffee Crawl at the end of the semester, where they will visit select coffee shops around campus.

One of the club’s primary endeavors is “cupping,” the industry term for the systematic sampling of different blends of coffee. Several kinds of coffee are tasted at a time, and special care is taken to avoid cross-contaminating blends.

After three minutes of brewing, cuppers take turns sampling the coffee with a spoon. The entire process can get a bit noisy.

“You slurp out of it, and the louder you slurp, the better,” Kunzelman instructed club members before taking a loud slurp from his spoon.

Though it may sound comical, slurping forces one to inhale the coffee’s aroma, an important aspect of the coffee’s taste.

Also important when cupping is “breaking the crust.” When brewed for cupping, the coffee grounds form a thin layer on the surface of the coffee. Breaking the crust is the process of breaking through the layer to release the aroma. This is generally when the coffee’s aroma is strongest, even more so than when grinding.

Alex Christie, president and founder of the Coffee Club and senior in LAS, said he originally took up brewing coffee for economic reasons.

“Freshman year I decided I didn’t want to pay too much money for coffee anymore, so I just went to Target and got a $30 espresso machine,” Christie said.

“I found out a year later those aren’t real espresso machines, but at the time I thought it was one.”

He said his machine broke a year later, and he decided he wanted to push his coffee IQ a little higher.

“I decided the best way to deepen my appreciation for coffee, outside of standing in my room making it, would be to get involved with other people.”

The drive to reach others with an appreciation for coffee led Christie to create the Coffee Club in the spring of 2008. It now has roughly 600 mailing list subscribers and between 30 and 40 regular members after just a year and a half.

The club has reached people like Michelle Parker, a senior in LAS, who found herself asking “Is it just me, or does this taste like iceberg lettuce?” after sampling a Nicaraguan Matagalpa.

The Coffee Club continues to grow in popularity, and according to Kunzelman, coffee is not going anywhere — even in the present economic climate.

“Coffee’s a weird thing,” he explains. “It’s cheap enough that people will still spend money on it. In a recession you’re probably not going to go buy a $40 bottle of wine, but you’ll still go buy a $2 cup of coffee.”

Coffee seems to have firmly entrenched itself in our culture, whether it’s premium coffee from the Columbia Street Roastery or Folgers.

“It’s something that has absolutely no simplicity about it all,” Kunzelman says of coffee.

“You can look at it as an artisan thing. You can look at it agriculturally, economically, politically. Whatever you want to see in it, you can generally find it.”