Cupping: it's a word very common in the coffee industry, and it's something we might mention to the public every now and then. But what exactly is cupping?
Cupping is first and foremost a method of quality control when it comes to tasting newly roasted coffees. Contrary to the bumper sticker you may have seen on a beat-up Honda Civic driving on the Garden State Parkway, not all coffee is created equal.
Coffee quality is graded on a scale from 0-100.
90-100 points (Outstanding): This is the rarest of the rare, representing roughly 1% of the world's coffee.
85-89.99 points (Excellent): This is high-end stuff! Usually processed with less standard processing techniques, creating unique characteristics from crop to crop.
80-84.99 points (Very Good): Specialty grade coffee. This is still better than your standard mass-market coffee. When you're drinkin' a black coffee and think, "Whoa, this is really good!" it's probably somewhere in here.
Below 80 points (Commodity / Non-Specialty): This is your standard coffee that you'll find on the shelves at the supermarket or large chain shops that don't emphasize the quality of their cups.
Now that the grading is covered, we try to keep all of our brews at a minimum of 82+ points, ensuring that you get a good cup every time. But where the real magic happens is the roaster. When we receive our unroasted coffee (commonly known as "green coffee"), we do a couple of trial runs at different roast levels and temperatures to try to pull out the best qualities that crop might hold. But how do we find that out? We CUP!
"Cupping" is simply a coffee tasting. Similar to a wine tasting, we try each cup roasted at different temperatures and lengths of time in order to pin down not only which one is "best," but which one is right.
For starters, small glasses of unfiltered coffee are poured in groups of three around a table, steeping freshly ground coffee until the precise second. Then it's time to "break the crust." The group participating in the cupping session each grabs a spoon and circles around the table, pushing the coffee that floats at the surface of the glass off to the sides, allowing the most authentic aromas to cloud one's sense of smell. This is the first moment you begin to see where the flavor notes are coming from.
Next, as the coffee grounds settle to the bottom of the glass, it's time to taste. The participants rinse their spoons, scoop a spoonful of the coffee in front of them, and give it a big "SLURP." It's actually comical how loud and aggressive some of the slurps can be. But there's a reason for this: it allows air to pass through your lips as you taste, opening up the flavors and giving you a deeper look into the coffee's profile.
This process continues until you've all circumnavigated the table at least three times, allowing each participant to have their moment with each individual coffee. Now it's time for discussion, the real key to a successful cupping session. The floor is open to any and all who feel the need to throw in their two cents. No opinions are "wrong," but there are generally "right" characteristics a coffee might show that ultimately lead the group to its flavor notes. Things you might hear at the cupping table include: "This Sumatra has a very earthy quality" or "I'm getting a lot of citrusy notes from this Costa Rica." Those are just starting points that might get boiled down to direct notes like "Dark Chocolate, Almond, and Grape."
Trust us, when you're there and it's being broken down in real time, IT MAKES SENSE!
Now we know, sometimes when you get a brand-new bag of Roaster's Pick, you might think to yourself, "This coffee doesn't taste like cherry?" But when you try it black, brewed the right way, and take a few minutes to really envelop your senses during your coffee experience, you'll get there.
And boom, you're now an expert in cupping.
