Tasting
Cupping coffee
The trade's standard way of comparing coffees, and a genuinely useful home exercise once you strip out the parts that exist for calibration between professionals.
- Skill level
- Intermediate
- How long it takes
- Half an hour for three or four coffees
- Equipment needed
- Cupping spoon, Digital scale, Burr grinder
- Steps
- 8
Safety
The bowls hold freshly boiled water and the spoon will be hot. Break the crust with your nose close enough to smell and far enough not to be caught by the steam.
Why it works this way
Cupping is a way of comparing coffees, not of making a nice drink. The same grind, the same dose, the same water, no filter and no pouring technique: each control is there so that the coffee is the only thing that differs between cups. There are two versions. The trade's published protocol specifies vessel volumes, a ratio, water and timings so that trained tasters can work to the same method; its figures are set out, with the document each comes from, in the cupping guide. A comparison at home borrows the shape and drops the form: identical bowls, identical everything, several coffees, one person. The steps below are that home version. Where a figure is given it is the published protocol's, not a recommendation.
What you need
Helpful, not essential
How to do it
Set out identical bowls or wide cups, one per coffee, and weigh the same dose into each.
Identical vessels matter more than which vessels. A coffee in a different bowl is a coffee with a different variable.
Grind each coffee at the same setting, a little coarser than for a paper filter, grinding directly into its bowl.
Purge a little of each coffee through the grinder first, so the previous coffee is not in the next bowl.
Smell the dry grounds in each bowl before adding any water.
The published protocol calls this fragrance and assesses it before any water is added.
Pour hot water into every bowl, saturating all the grounds, and leave them undisturbed.
Grounds rise and mat into a crust on the surface. The published protocol pours to the rim and leaves the crust unbroken for three to five minutes; smell it while you wait, and do not stir.
Break the crust: stir it about three times with the spoon while smelling what is released.
Break each bowl in turn. From here on, rinse the spoon in hot water before it goes into any bowl, as the protocol requires.
Skim the foam and floating grounds off the surface with two spoons.
The protocol discards the floating grounds, foam and oils before tasting.
Wait for it to cool, then taste by slurping from the spoon.
The protocol begins tasting at about 70 °C, which can still scald: wait until a spoonful is comfortable. The slurp spreads the coffee over the tongue and palate, and the protocol keeps it because it helps smell reach the nose from the mouth.
Taste around the table repeatedly as the coffees cool, rinsing the spoon between bowls.
The protocol asks for at least three rounds as the cups cool to below body temperature. Note what changes for you; one consumer study found temperature made little difference to liking across the range it tested.
How to tell it worked
A clear ranking of which coffee is sweeter, cleaner, more acidic or more interesting than which — arrived at under conditions where the coffee is the only thing that differed.
If it did not work
What you saw, what to change, and why the change works.
The bowls taste muddy
Change: Skim more thoroughly, and let the bowls settle before tasting.
Unfiltered coffee carries fine grounds in suspension, and a rough texture is easy to mistake for a taste. Keep the grind the same across bowls, or they stop being comparable.
Everything tastes the same
Change: Cup coffees that are genuinely different — two origins or two processes, not two roasters' takes on the same thing.
Comparative tasting needs a difference large enough to perceive before it can teach anything.
The aroma at the break is gone before you reach the third bowl
Change: Break fewer bowls at a time.
Three or four bowls is a comfortable table for one person; the published protocol caps a session at six coffees for a table of tasters.
Common mistakes
Treating a home cupping as a score
A number that means nothing, because scoring exists to make judgements comparable between calibrated professionals.
Instead: Rank the coffees against each other and describe why. That is the useful part and it needs no certification.
Using different vessels
A different bowl is a second difference between the cups; the published protocol requires vessels of identical volume, dimensions and material.
Instead: Identical bowls, identical fill.
Not rinsing the spoon between bowls
Each coffee carries a little of the last one.
Instead: Rinse in hot water before every bowl, as the protocol requires.
Diagnose a specific problem
The science behind it
- Aroma
The smell of coffee, which contributes heavily to how it tastes.
- Acidity (brightness)
The bright, tangy quality in coffee — a desirable trait in specialty coffee, not a flaw.
- Sweetness
A perceived sugary quality in coffee, without any added sugar.
- Body (mouthfeel weight)
How heavy or light a coffee feels in the mouth, independent of flavour.
- Aftertaste
What is left in your mouth after you swallow, and how long it stays.
Drinks this makes
Background reading
Where this is taught
Become a Coffee Expert · Level 11
The professional method for comparing coffees fairly, and the biases it exists to control.