By Michael Barker
I still remember my first cupping well.
I turned up for my first day of work at Steampunk at 8am and Ludwika let me know that, like every morning, we were going to be doing a ‘cupping’ of all the coffee she had roasted the day before. She’d roasted around 4 different coffees, and she’d done multiple batches of each one. I was instructed to measure out exactly 13 grams of each batch, not a tenth of a gram more or less, and place them into individual cups in a line across the table. I soon learned the entire cupping process would be this precise; from the grind required, to the brewtime, to the way you break the crust of coffee that forms at the top, to the way you scoop that crust off, to the way you slurp. We then tried them one by one, in silence, and I was encouraged to make my own notes. Finally, she took off her headphones and asked me,
“So? What did you get?”
…my notes were less than extensive.
That first time, I really struggled to notice anything except a distinct taste of coffee, and I questioned why we were even doing what we were doing. I was shocked that she had mustered up a whole range of insights about body, acidity, sweetness, defects, processing and precise tasting notes that I couldn’t taste at all. To be frank, I started to question whether she was making it all up, but as we continued to do more cuppings, even blind ones in which I wouldn’t tell her or Rachel what was in each cup, they would both correctly identify different coffees, origins and varietals just by tasting. It all seemed impossible at first but the more I participated, the more my palate developed. Each time I cupped, individual elements and variables in each batch of coffee became more apparent.
And so, in line with us hosting a cupping in Edinburgh next week, I thought I’d share a candid behind the scenes look at the questions I had before my first cupping - Why do we cup coffee? How do we cup? What are we looking for? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we know we’re not making it all up as we go?
Why do we cup coffee?
Cupping is ultimately a way to taste roasted coffee in its purest form - ground beans and water poured on top. It’s a consistent and methodical way to taste coffee under the exact same conditions, attempting to keep every variable apart from the coffee controlled and allowing the cupper to score each cup on the table in a fair and unbiased way.
Coffee, being a plant product, is inherently volatile, and many miniscule things can negatively affect its taste. Perhaps it was roasted a few seconds too long, or the roast ended up half a degree too low. Maybe the greens were a bit old and dry; maybe there was a defect in one of the sacks, or a whole range of other variables. We cup coffee as a means of deciphering, in its purest form, exactly what a coffee tastes like.
What are we looking for?
Different cuppings require us to place our focus on different elements. The cuppings that we do the most in the roastery are quality control (QC) cuppings, which we do every morning. These cuppings are a chance to cup every batch of coffee that Rachel or Ludwika roasted the day before, and check that they’re up to standard before we pack them and send them out to our customers. We use a short form version of the official Specialty Coffee Association cupping sheet for these, scoring a coffee between 1 and 10, and considering its acidity, sweetness, complexity and body. In QC cuppings we’re checking for quality and consistency: that the coffee tastes how we’ve decided it should and that all the batches of a particular coffee taste the same. Often we will compare the coffee to a previous batch of the same coffee that we really liked. We’ll check the variables above and spot any defects if they arise. We’re constantly comparing our roasts to roasts we’ve done before and looking for differences and changes in quality. Because we roast in a warehouse in North Berwick we especially have to pay attention to weather conditions, which can impact the airflow and the temperature of the roaster day by day. If we find a batch of coffee to have a slightly better body than the rest, or a sweeter finish or, equally, if we find a batch that isn’t tasting quite as rounded as the rest, we will check the data for that roast and adjust future roasts accordingly to ensure we’re always getting the best out of a coffee.
Another time we do cuppings is when we are looking to buy a new coffee. We will receive a range of samples of coffee from importers and producers from the region we are interested in, often around 50g each, and we’ll roast these samples on our sample roaster, which is a mini version of the production roaster. In these cuppings, we’re looking at the same variables as in QC, but we’ll tend to cup blind and pay more attention to elements like tasting notes, processing, suitability for our customers, defects and signs of age (when coffee gets old it develops a dull papery taste, that later develops into what I can only describe as wet cardboard). Due to our focus on seasonality, it’s important that any coffee we buy is as fresh as possible and from the most recent harvest. We also, of course, have to pay attention to price, but we’ll often reveal price only once we have finished cupping and discussed the coffees to ensure we are being impartial in the first instance.
How do we take notes?
There are loads of different ways to take notes on cuppings, and what you do depends on your reason for cupping in the first place! If you were grading coffee and giving it a score to help determine its market value, you’d likely use the SCA cupping form. On my first day at Steampunk, I just used my notes app on my phone and put a star next to the cups I liked best, with simple bullet points about what I liked. The form we use most is designed simply for quality control of our production roasts.
When we cup multiple roasts, we use an app called CropsterCup that is linked to our roasting application so that we can correlate our tasting notes back to the roast data. Each batch appears like this image (left). At the top, we’ll see PR-xxxxx, the number of the batch that we’re tasting. Below that, we’ll see the name of the coffee that’s been roasted in that batch.
If we sip it, and it tastes how it should, we give it a QC score of 5 on this form. If it tasted worse than normal, we would score it below 5, and if it tasted better than normal, we would score it higher. When scoring 3 or below, or 7 and above, we explain why by adding scores for its individual characteristics and further comments.
How do we know we're being objective?
This is the big question. The process of cupping removes as much bias as possible, but because our sense of taste is subjective it’s impossible to remove all bias. Cafe Imports’ Director of Sensory Analysis, Ian Fretheim, wrote a piece about Common Sensory Errors and how we might mitigate them in a cupping. There’s a whole host of sensory errors that can affect our experience of coffees on the cupping table. He mentions how physiological factors like fatigue and adaptation can make a coffee’s flavour attributes more or less pronounced. And psychological factors can include the contrast effect (when a good sample just before a poor one causes the second sample to receive a lower rating than if it had been rated next to a coffee of equal quality) or the habituation error (the tendency to continue to give the same response when a series of slowly increasing or decreasing stimuli are presented). Even the position of a cup on the table can influence how we perceive what we’re tasting; samples placed near the center of a set tend to be preferred over those placed at the ends. And how can we be sure we’re not subconsciously pushing one another into tasting things that aren’t there?
We do our best to mitigate bias by not speaking until after we’ve tasted the coffees. Then we compare notes and more often than not we find that we’ve written similar things. Cupping blind can be a powerful way to test whether anticipation and preconceptions are impacting our assessment. And finally, the frequency of cupping every day keeps our palates sharp and means that we know our coffee well!
In a slightly more laid back environment, we also enjoy cupping coffees from other roasters, and blind tasting them alongside our own coffees to try to identify which are which. Rachel, one of our roasters, is a certified Q Grader, meaning she has developed an exceptional palate for coffee! But she’s said herself that tasting coffee requires regular practice, and even a week away from cupping can have an impact on your ability to spot things. These cuppings are more informal, but are a way for us to ensure that we’re actually tasting what we think we’re tasting. There’s always a level of subjectivity in cupping coffee, but identifying coffees blind requires objective analysis of different elements of the coffee, understanding of varieties, processing methods and common tasting notes of particular regions.
As intimidating as I found it the first time I did it, cupping is a simple way for anyone to taste coffee, whether you perceive undertones of rhubarb and bergamot from one sniff or if it all tastes exactly the same! The more you practice tasting, the more your palate will develop, and ultimately the more you’ll be able to appreciate good coffee.
If you’re interested in trying cupping at home, James Hoffman has a great video on YouTube showing how to set up your own simple cupping, linked here: https://youtu.be/cSEgP4VNynQ?si=8jclhMv3nZoVrVR_
Alternatively, if you’re keen to cup our coffee with us in a very chilled, informal (and absolutely not blind or silent) setting, we will be hosting a free cupping on Wednesday 26th February at Cappuccino in Edinburgh! You can sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/steampunk-coffee-x-cappuccino-seasonal-cupping-tickets-1237719886499?aff=oddtdtcreator&utm-source=cp&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing
Hope to see you there!