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.
The setup, in one paragraph
Equal doses of coarsely ground coffee go into identical small bowls. Near-boiling water is poured directly onto the grounds until each bowl is full. A crust of grounds and oils forms at the top. It is left undisturbed for exactly four minutes. The cupper then breaks the crust with a spoon while inhaling the released aroma, removes the floating grounds and foam, and waits for the brew to cool enough to taste. Every evaluation follows the same sensory order: fragrance, aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness.
Why it works for evaluation
Three properties make cupping the right tool:
- Reproducibility: every variable that can be fixed is fixed. The only thing changing is the coffee.
- Comparability: bowls sit side by side. Direct comparison is sharper than serial tasting.
- No technique to blame: there's no pour to mess up, no bed to channel. If a cup tastes flat, the coffee is flat.
Pour-over and espresso introduce noise — a slightly different pour, a different basket prep, can change the cup. Cupping strips that out. What's left is the coffee.
Why it's worth doing at home
Three bowls of three different coffees, side by side, teaches you more about flavour than a week of pour-overs. You hear roasters talk about citric vs malic acidity, about washed vs natural, about Ethiopia vs Kenya — and most of it is hard to grasp until you cup. Then it's obvious.
The next articles cover the standard SCA protocol, the new CVA 2024 standard, a scaled-down home version, the triangle test (a discrimination exercise), and how to target a specific TDS once you have a refractometer.