It would be hard to overstate the importance of coffee cupping, the process by which coffee buyers and roasters assess beans in as diagnostic a manner as a personal thing like taste can be. When you see descriptions of coffee and the flavors you can expect from a particular bean, they are often based on the results of one or more cupping sessions. Of course, what you taste in your cup will be dependent on a number of factors including the age of the beans, how they were roasted and how you brew the coffee. Yet, the public appears largely ignorant of the importance of cupping to the industry, unlike say the wine industry.
Although akin to the sip-and-spit approach used for wine tasting, a coffee cupping should not be confused with a coffee tasting. One major difference, a cupping does not involve brewing coffee in a traditional sense, but is more akin to steeping tea. In essence, the process is meant to be consistent and to exhibit as many of a coffee’s flavors as possible, the good and the bad. IMHO, any brewing method should ideally be aimed at bringing out the coffee’s best qualities.
Calling it a diagnostic process may make it sound a bit dull, but cupping is rarely a boring process. Witness the colorful wheel above, which represents just some of the more common aromas and flavors you can expect from a well-heeled coffee. I recently cupped a coffee that when ground threw off the distinct fragrance of fruitloops. Others smell like caramel, cinnamon, peaches, blueberry, mildew, fresh-cut grass or truffles. And that’s before you add water.
Coffee cupping is the way professionals begin to dig into the deep well of flavors that is hidden just below the surface of the coffee bean. Without this process, we would be lost in the wilderness without a compass (or perhaps in this day and age, a GPS navigator). It is one way roasters ensure that they are using the best-quality beans available.
