Section
Cupping
You don't cup to brew better — you cup to taste honestly. Same grind, same bowls, same four-minute steep, every time. Strip the brewer's flattery away and you finally see the coffee for what it is: side by side, this lot against last week's.
6 Articles
Articles
Why cupping matters
Cupping is the standardised tasting protocol the specialty coffee industry uses to evaluate coffees. It was codified by the Specialty Coffee Association in the 1990s and is the method behind every score on a bag of single-origin, every green-bean buying decision, and every competition. Unlike the brewing methods elsewhere in this app, cupping isn't designed to produce a pleasant cup. It's designed to produce a comparable one.
Intro
2 min
The SCA protocol
The Specialty Coffee Association cupping protocol is the lingua franca of coffee evaluation. It was published in the early 2000s and was the basis of every cupping score, every Q-grader exam, and every competition until November 2024 (when CVA 2024 replaced it — covered in the next article). The 2004 protocol still matters: it's the version most roasters trained on, and the one you'll see referenced everywhere.
Intermediate
2 min
The CVA 2024 standard
In November 2024 the SCA replaced its 2004 cupping protocol with the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), published as Standard 102-2024. It's the most consequential change to cupping in twenty years. Most of the mechanics stay the same; what changes is how you score and what the scores mean.
Intermediate
3 min
Cupping at home
You don't need a Q-grader certificate to cup. Three bowls and a kitchen scale will teach you more in an afternoon than a year of casual brewing. The point isn't to score; it's to compare.
Intro
3 min
The triangle test
The triangle test is a discrimination exercise: three identical bowls, two of one coffee and one of another, presented blind. The taster has to identify which one is different. It isn't about preference or scoring — it answers a single question: can you actually tell these two coffees apart?
Intermediate
2 min
Hitting a TDS target
Once you have a refractometer, cupping stops being purely sensory. You can measure the actual concentration of the brew (TDS, total dissolved solids) and use that to back-calculate the extraction yield. The Barista Hustle protocol is the most-cited standard for this — it targets 1.4% TDS at 8 minutes after pour, with a fixed 11 g / 200 ml ratio.
Advanced
3 min
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