Cupping Coffee: How and Why
Cupping is the industry-wide standard for tasting and evaluating coffees. It is the standard because it is the quickest, easiest, and most consistent way to brew lots of coffees to an even, high extraction. It is not necessarily the way to make a coffee taste the best. Read on to find out how to do it and why it is so useful in some circumstances.
Here’s how we do it:
Heat your water to 210-211 degrees F. A gooseneck kettle is not required. If you don’t have an adjustable temperature kettle, just boil the water and use it right away (no need to let it cool).
Grind your coffee(s). It can be helpful to purge a few beans of each new coffee through your grinder before grinding your actual dose to remove any residue of previous coffees. We also recommend that you grind a few extra grams of each coffee in case the grinder retains some of the grounds. Grind size should be medium-fine and it is better to err on the side of too fine than too coarse. It should be a little bit finer than the grind you would use for a single cup pourover brew.
Get 12.5 grams of each ground coffee into a separate cupping bowl. If you don’t have dedicated cupping bowls, don’t worry, you can use any mug that is at least 200 mL capacity.
Start a timer, and pour 200 grams of your boiling water into each bowl. This is a 16:1 brew ratio. The official SCA protocol calls for more water (a weaker ratio) but we prefer to cup this way. Pour pretty quickly and aim for any dry spots that you see. You want to make sure all the coffee gets wet and there are no dry clumps left.
After 4 minutes, it is time to “break the crust” and skim off the foam. If your coffee isn’t very fresh, you won’t have a crust. Don’t worry about that. You may also not get a crust if the coffee is fresh but roasted very, very lightly, perhaps so light that it is underdeveloped. The basic idea here is that you just want to push down any grounds that are floating on top with the bubbly foam. Then use two spoons to scoop off what’s left on top.
Wait another 15 minutes AFTER you’ve broken the crust to start tasting the coffee. So yes, 19 minutes after you pour the water is a good time to start tasting. To taste, simply scoop a little liquid off the top of cup (the grounds are still sitting at the bottom) and slurp away. The obnoxious slurping is actually genuinely useful as it sprays the coffee all over your mouth, which lets more of your tastebuds send signals to your brain about what you are tasting.
Why cup?
There are a few different scenarios where cupping is a great tool:
One reason is if you want to taste several coffees at once (or one coffee brewed with several different water compositions). It is simply faster, easier, and more consistent than trying to dial in five different pourovers. Comparative tasting is also very helpful as it makes it much easier to pick out what you like about one coffee and dislike about another without having to rely on your memory about how another coffee tasted a few days/weeks/months/years ago.
Second, and likely the most important one for the home brewer, is if you have tried your usual brew recipe with a coffee, perhaps with a few iterations of grind size, and you just cannot get it to taste good. Stop immediately, do not waste any more of the coffee trying to dial it in. Cup it. The cupping will tell you what kinds of flavors the coffee has to offer at a high, even extraction. If your cupping tastes better than your normal brews do, then there is an issue with your brew recipe or technique. If your cupping tastes similar to or worse than your normal brews do, then there probably isn’t really an issue with your normal brewing. The most likely scenario in this case is that it is a coffee that does not taste good at high, even extractions (basically, it has some type of defect), and your best bet will be to try to extract less with your normal brewing, so grind coarser/use less water/use cooler water/use less agitation/reduce brew time. This is exactly what will happen if a coffee is roasted darker than your preferred roast level. If there is no defect and the cupping just tastes pretty bland and underwhelming, then the coffee itself is just underwhelming and there isn’t really anything you can do to make it taste better.
Finally, cupping is very useful for evaluating different roast profiles and for quick quality assurance of production roasts.
It is worth mentioning again that you need to be grinding pretty fine and using water that is at least reasonably good for brewing coffee when you cup. Otherwise your cuppings will all taste bad!
