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.
Articles
6- 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