Cupping Coffee: Comparisons, Analysis, Deliciousness

Hello,

This week we got the opportunity, as part of the Cup of Excellence, to roast and cup some of the top coffees from this year’s Brazil competition. For those unfamiliar, the Cup of Excellence is an organization that has put together national coffee competitions in a variety of coffee growing countries from Brazil to Rwanda. Farmers submit their top lots of coffee, micro-lots, best milled or processed to a panel of national and international professional cuppers who cup and score these coffees. The best coffees ( I believe those that surpass the score of 84) are then sold at an international auction, giving the growers of these coffees far better premiums on their effort than the fickle open market and putting some of the best coffees in the world on display and in the hands of some of the best roasteries.

10 Brazils

I picked a random selection of 10 coffees among the top 26 that we received and sample-roasted them all. The sample roast is lighter than what one would drink normally. This way the roast caramelizes without roasting away acidity or imparting characteristics associated with the roasting process (dark, smoky, etc….)  Then I went about setting up the cupping table.

The Cup of Excellence Score Sheet

Basic Cupping:

What’s cupping?  Cupping is used to evaluate coffees based on aromatics and taste. A roast is ground, brewed, and tasted by the cupper, who notes flavor and aromatic distinctions and scores it based on a range of characteristics inherent in coffee — from body to acidity to aftertaste and balance.

The first step after roasting and letting it sit for a day is measuring out and grinding multiple cups of each coffee. If you want to try this at home with your coffees, it’s roughly 12 grams coffee to an 8-ounce cup (porcelain or glass) at a drip grind. Official standards exist for both Cup of Excellence and the Specialty Coffee Association of America and you can look them up at their respective websites.

Roasted, Ground and Ready.

Once it is ground, we sniff the coffees and evaluate the intensity and associations we can make on the fragrance. Next we pour water in every cup and start timing the brewing. We go around and sniff the “crust” that forms atop each cup as the blooming grounds have risen to the top and are holding in volatile aromatics at the same time the brew is extracting all that sweet goodness from the coffees.

After about four minutes of brewing, we take cupping spoons (a sort of silver plated soup spoon made for this process) and gently break the crust on the coffees while stuffing our nose right down into the break to get a full dose of those aromatics jumping out. We take notes here, too.

Steve and Andy getting on with it...

When the breaking is done, we clean off anything floating atop the cups with our spoons and rinse them. Then, at about 12 minutes since the brewing started, we take small amounts from each cup in our spoons, one at time, and slurp HARD and LOUD, swish, make weird sounds, and spit into our spittoon cups. We note Acidity, Body, Flavor, Aftertaste, Balance, Sweetness, Cleanness, Uniformity and give it an overall rating as well.  We slurp for around 10-20 minutes or so throughout the cooling process to see how the coffee holds up.

My groadie scoresheet with notes 'n thangs...

Finally, we compile our scores and talk about ones we liked and didn’t and compare how we all scored with each other.
This also helps us to calibrate our palates, so we all evaluate on a similar curve and don’t end up with radically different takes on the same coffee.

Our experience with the Brazils on this round was an interesting one. Our team here somewhat unanimously favored the 20th place coffee among the other nine coffees on the table. All of them were excellent though and very difficult to score in some cases because the similarities outweighed the differences. Nonetheless, we had fun and tried some of the best Brazil has to offer. On the occasion that you come across a Cup of Excellence coffee yourself, I encourage to try it out. You won’t be disappointed.

cheers – Ryan