Marcus Baumgardner
Cuppingis the industry standard which helps coffee roasters select the coffees theyoffer. Cuppers will place multiple flights of the same coffee on the table not onlyto taste if the coffees are delicious, but that they remain consistent from cupto cup. Experienced cuppers will be able to predict how the coffees will tastewhen they create a roast profile for production roasting.
The usualproduction roast profiles of coffees that you would find being sold on shelvesand brewed in cafés isn't the typical of the coffees tasted on the cuppingtable in a professional sense. The sample roast, a standard used with quality-focused coffee companies, is a very lightly roasted coffee. The beansthemselves are lightly browned and look almost like they have veins runningthrough them. Most companies have a smaller sample roaster dedicated forroasting small batches (200g or so) of sample roasted coffee and experimentingwith profiling coffees.
The point of a sample roast is to let the coffee “speakfor itself,” because of the lighter roast coffees will have more apparentflavors that are inherent to the bean. If the bean passes through the qualitycontrol people, then those flavors will be “evened out” when it’s profiled forproduction.
How it works
- Cuppers line up flights on a table, indicating them by letter or number.
- Each flight has several cups in a row filled with roughly 12g of the same coffee
- The cuppers will then go around the table smelling the coffee to get an aromatic impression of the coffee, noting and scoring along the way.
- While this is happening, water is being heated to pour into the cups.
- After the dry grounds have been assessed, water is poured into the cups and the coffee is allowed to extract for four minutes.
- After four minutes a crust of coffee will have formed at the topped and the cuppers will now go around at break the crust.
- To do this they will get their nose as close as possible to the crust and, with their cupping spoon, break through and stir around the slurry of coffee and take another aromatic assessment of the coffee. This is done with all of the coffees on the table.
- After the second aromatic assessment is done, the foam is scooped off the top and the slurping begins. Cuppers will take their spoons, fill ‘em up with some coffee and slurp, much how you would expect a child to slurp their soup. They make sure to disperse the coffee across their entire mouth, noting not only how it tastes but where those tastes are prevalent on their palate, whether or not it’s pleasant, how the body of the coffee feels in their mouth and how acidic it is.
- Coffees are tasted from hot to cold, scored and selected by this process.
A fun experiment at home
- Get two coffees that a coffee roastery recommends are very different (like anything from Ethiopia vs. anything from Brazil).
- Set up a cupping at home, tasting the difference between the two coffees and taking notes.
- Doing enough of this will refine your palate enough that you can try a triangulation, which is...
Triangulation
- Select three or four coffees (depending on how many flights you want).
- Have someone who will know the answers set up flights.
- Within those flights, make two coffees the same and one different.
- Go through the cupping process (smelling dry, breaking the crust, slurping hot to cold) and try to decipher which is different, even comment on flavor notes you taste.
All photos courtesy of Marcus Baumgardner.
