What is Coffee Cupping?

Cupping coffee is a tasting method used by coffee professionals all over the world! It’s meant as a tool to help evaluate the different attributes of a coffee and assess the quality. Cupping is especially a great way to taste many coffees side by side. With its specific, rigorous parameters, it allows coffee professionals to eliminate the variables we typically deal with when manually brewing coffee.

Who cups?

While anyone can cup coffee, cupping is primarily done by coffee professionals in very specific situations such as importers or exporters evaluating a coffee to decide whether or not to purchase it, coffee roasters evaluating the profile they have used to roast a coffee, and baristas and other professionals developing their palates! While some people may wish to cup strictly for a sensory overview of the coffee, others might cup to make sure there isn’t anything wrong with the coffee (ex. mold, “baggy” flavors from the coffee’s storage, or any other defects).

How often do people cup?

It’s great practice for professional cuppers to cup daily (even if they are not deciding on a coffee for purchase), and many do! A busy cupper may need to cup dozens of coffees at a time, several days in a row.

Is cupping like wine tasting?

A ton of people have drawn comparisons between coffee cupping and wine tasting, and both are excellent opportunities both to develop your palate and to develop the vocabulary to communicate what you’re tasting. It is important to distinguish that wine tasting, as most people think of it, is widely practiced by all levels of wine enjoyers. Wine tasting can be anything from a casual weekend in wine country enjoying a “wine tasting” to its formal evaluative nature done by wine professionals, sommeliers, and point score adjudicating journalist types. Meanwhile, coffee cupping tends mostly to stay in the domain of those formally evaluating a coffee for purchasing, education, or other professionally driven reasons. There are public cuppings, and those can be incredibly valuable for the casual coffee drinker to develop their palates.

How do you cup?

In its simplest form, cupping is essentially brewing coffee with water, coffee, and a small cup or bowl. This is meant to eliminate variables and allow the cupper to better see, smell, and taste what’s going on in the cup!

The Specialty Coffee Association, or SCA for short, has produced longstanding cupping standards that have been widely accepted as best practices across the industry. The SCA standards consist of basic parameters such as grind size, water temperature, and equipment. It’s common for cuppers to establish a cupping setting that reduces distractions, such as restricting the presence of other fragrances like perfume and sometimes even working under a particular hue of lighting. Special spoons are also involved!

In a typical cupping, you will see coffee measured into small cups or bowls and brewed directly there. After steeping, the crust of grounds is broken with a spoon, then manually scooped out. Coffee is smelled and tasted at numerous stages of the process, such as when the coffee is hot, warm, and cool and evaluated for attributes like sweetness, acidity, body, etc.

Tasting is usually done with an especially round and deep spoon, from which coffee is slurped (usually with gusto) in order to spread as much of the coffee around the taster’s palate as possible.

While cupping, cuppers will note down their assessments on standardized forms. The forms are—or have been—key to standardized cupping, as the standards allow professionals across continents to be calibrated with one another and, in theory, agree with another coffee cupper’s results. Coffees using the SCA Cupping Protocol are given qualitative scores, up to 100, with coffees scored 80 or higher considered “specialty” grade.

Coffee cupping plays a vital role within the coffee industry. From palate development to helping with making buying decisions, this easy way of brewing coffee can make a world of difference in leveling up your coffee game. Here at Little Bear we cup coffees all the time, and with us kicking off monthly cupping, we hope you’ll be able to cup too.