Coffee Day 3: Resting Cupping Face
"Coffee Scum. That's us." I say as we're setting up for our first full-sized cupping. I'm thinking about the all the steps in the process of cupping: the synchronized pouring, the breaking and cleaning, and then the part where we walk around in a circle, taking turns poking our noses at the rows of white bowls dosing out small sips of coffee into cups and then walking away to hide from everyone else and slurp meditatively in a corner, and how odd it must look to someone who's never participated in one. I'm thinking also of Mr. Giovanni Gaggia, who in 1938 brilliantly renamed the oily layer of "coffee scum" that appeared on the product of his newly invented espresso machine, "crema caffè" and changed how the world perceived coffee forever.
As we've learned in the course, sensory analysis is a scientific discipline. The world of coffee on the other hand is full of exacting rituals and apocryphal stories.
Valerian instructs us as he shuffles from station to station supervising the setup, "You must have a poker face when you're cupping. You can't make sounds like 'ooh' or 'ahh' or make a face or you'll bias the other cuppers. If you do it during the Q, you'll have to leave."
I walk over to a couple of the other Q-hopefuls and we pantomime practicing our poker faces: bouncing between straight faces and smiles that are half faked, half from the giddy anticipation of evaluating interesting coffees while we ourselves are being scrutinized. I try to dial in my poker face. I'm bouncing between stern and neutral, trying to look like I'm taking it seriously without coming across too pretentious. I'm definitely overthinking it.
It's almost time to begin. We're about to circle back up to start the cupping. I try to summarize the expression we've been practicing as we prepare to focus our senses solely on the qualities of the cups before us:
"It's my resting cupping face."
It's Wednesday, the first day of the SCA Sensory Intermediate course.
Let's talk about papillae some other time because today it's getting too late for me to properly review them and do a writeup. I was promised I'd get to lick paper tomorrow to see how bad it tastes, and somehow I'm looking forward to that. Even though our class today was the first day of the SCA Sensory Intermediate module, it felt like a continuation of the things we started learning yesterday in SCA Sensory Foundations. Yesterday, we examined how to use the SCA flavor wheel as an aide for describing flavors, and today we spent most of the lecture segment talking about how to score coffees on the SCA cupping form.
A Bit More About Sensory Analysis
If you're not calibrated, you won't provide objective measurements.
There are four steps:
- Evoke: design experiments to best evaluate a sensory experience
- Measure: Collect data, e.g. using a scoring sheet or digital tools like Tastify
- Analyze: Use statistical methods to analyze the results
- Interpret: Understand your results in the context of decisions to be made
Review: What Is Cupping?
Cupping is a procedure for evaluating the attributes of a coffee while controlling as many variables as possible. This is where sensory analysis meets practical applications in the production, roasting, and brewing of coffee. The form of cupping we use in this class (and for the Q) follows the SCA Cupping Protocol, which is designed to evaluate the potential of a sample of green coffee by keeping the roasting and brewing methods constant to reduce their impact. It's a very prescriptive protocol that's meant to give each coffee a fair shot at evaluation since the results of cupping determine a coffee's quality score and, indirectly, price.
You can check out the SCA's website for the exact details, or you can watch some of these YouTube videos to get the gist of it:
What Cupping Is And Is Not
Two things to note here:
1. It's analytical, not necessarily indicative of preference.
2. It's specific to coffee (though similar processes may exist for evaluating other things, like wine).
End customers are not trained or calibrated as cuppers. While they can certainly taste coffees and offer their evaluations, they don't know the technical language and standards of cupping, and their scores will be more subjective and less objective compared to trained cuppers whose scores are calibrated with each other.
The procedure for cupping requires an environment free of interfering odors (or any other distracting stimuli, like noise) that could affect the results.
Evaluating cleanliness is an important aspect of cupping, but there's a lot more to it, especially for high-quality speciality coffees that ought to have good quality control to begin with.
The course highlights the important role that cupping has for buyers of green coffee specifically:
- It was originally created solely to detect defects in shipments of coffee, but has expanded to include identifying and describing positive qualities of a coffee.
- It facilitates communications between buyers and sellers about the quality and value of a lot of coffee.
- It allows buyers to evaluate the coffee they receive against contract agreements and mitigate rejections.
The Setup for Cupping
When cupping coffees, we need to assess both quality and uniformity. Therefore, we need to taste multiple examples of the same coffee in order to evaluate whether it is consistent and free of defects. In order to do this, we brew each coffee (called a "sample") five times in parallel. Each of these is one cup, and there are five cups per sample (which, again, is one coffee). If multiple coffees are being cupped, then there are five times as many cups of brewed coffee being evaluated. For example, if there are six coffees being cupped, that means we have six "samples". Each sample has five cups, so we will brew and evaluate 30 cups of coffee total. As you can imagine, you have to be pretty fast to do this before the coffee cools down and its flavor changes.
It can be handy to put all five cups in a sample on a tray with labels designating each cup from 1 to 5. This is important because if a sample contains a defect, the cuppers need to note which specific cups they found the defect in.
- Everyone shares all of the trays. They are not individual.
- It's not 1 cup per person. Everyone must try every cup.
- All of the cups on the tray (e.g. in the sample) are of the same coffee. They are supposed to taste identical, but they might not if there are uniformity issues.
This tripped me up at first, and I noticed it confused some folks in the class too. Here's an infographic showing how the 5 cups in a sample are arranged in an "M" shaped formation.
Here's a wider shot of the cupping table from the image at the top of this post. There are six samples on the table. Each sample is on a tray that's arranged like the graphic above.
The Results of Cupping (Other Than The Score)
Clear, Comprehensive Descriptors
Descriptors are a tool for cuppers to communicate with each other, with other professionals who are interested in the coffee, and sometimes with consumers who are unfamiliar with industry lexicon. Descriptors that are specific and evocative to a specific cupper may help them remember a certain cup and capture their feelings about it, but might not be useful to others who have never experienced the aroma being referenced. Doubly so if the descriptor doesn't refer to an aroma, but to a memory specific that person experienced (e.g. "my grandma's gingerbread cookies right as they come out of the oven").
I think that both specific and accessible descriptors are important, and each has its place, but we should keep our audience in mind when we decide what to write on a cupping form or bag of coffee. There's clearly an art to figuring how to describe a coffee in a way that connects with a particular audience based on their technical sophistication and the palette of flavors they experience. Just in our class today we had people with connections to North, South, and Central America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, East Asia and India. Specific flavors and foods from all of those places have come up repeatedly, and sharing them all with each other can paint a pretty vivid picture of a complex taste experience.
Thorough Analysis of Acidity, Body, Balance, and Sweetness
Specialty-grade Arabica coffees are required to have a certain level of perceived sweetness, and the other aspects listed (acidity, body, and balance) are specific attributes that are judged on the SCA cupping form to reward coffees that exhibit positive qualities.
Acknowledgement and Identification of Defects
There are three "technical" categories on the form which represent aspects of the coffee other than how it's experienced when you drink it. These aspects are closer to an evaluation of how the coffee performs as a commodity:
- Uniformity: Do multiple cups in a sample taste the same, or are there different characteristics or defects in some of them?
- Clean Cup: Are there any issues in the cup (taints or faults) that make the coffee taste off or indicate issues in the processing or storage of the coffee?
- Sweetness: Does the coffee contain the required level of sweetness characteristic of a specialty-grade arabica (equivalent to 5g/L of sugar)? This is related to "Clean Cup" since cups without issues generally contain sweetness. In most specialty coffees, things need to go pretty wrong for a cup to not exhibit that minimum bar of sweetness.
In these categories, a coffee starts off with full points (10) and 2 points are subtracted for each cup that fails to meet the standard. If a cup is marked down for not being a "clean cup", that indicates that a defect (taint or fault) is present, and the defect must be named.
Having a cup fail one of these categories often carries compounding penalties For example, if a cup fails "clean cup", it fails "uniformity" as well, and it'll lose at least 2 additional points for whatever defect caused it to fail. It's important to get these right because wrongly marking down a cup for a defect could drastically penalize that coffee and unfairly punish coffee producers.
The Scores
- Coffee is scored on a 100 point scale.
- The bar for specialty coffee is 80+ points.
- A coffee's score only counts if it's determined by at least 2 independent Q graders.
There are ten categories, each worth ten points. They are broken down as follows:
| Quality Categories | Gets points for the quality of... | 70 pts Total |
|---|---|---|
| Fragrance/Aroma | Fragrance is smell of the dry grounds; aroma is the smell of the brewed coffee. | 10 pts |
| Flavor | The aroma and taste in your mouth. | 10 pts |
| Aftertaste | The lingering flavors after swallowing or spitting. | 10 pts |
| Acidity | The favorability of the acidity in the coffee. | 10 pts |
| Body | The texture and mouthfeel. | 10 pts |
| Balance | How well the flavor, aftertaste, acidity, and aroma work together. | 10 pts |
| Overall | The cupper's overall impression of the coffee. | 10 pts |
| Technical Categories | Starts with full points and loses points if... | 30 pts Total |
|---|---|---|
| Uniformity | A cup tastes different (usually worse) than the others. | 10 pts |
| Clean Cup | Something tastes defective in the cup. | 10 pts |
| Sweetness | The cup is so impacted by a defect that no sweetness is detectable. | 10 pts |
An 80 point coffee might be inoffensive (it "tastes like coffee") but lack unique flavors that make it more special than most other coffees. It might be improved with some cream and sugar. It's probably not too memorable. Its main flavors are probably those most common to coffee: chocolate, caramel, nutty, etc.
An 84 point coffee has a story to tell. It's the kind of coffee that has "notes", and you probably won't have to work that hard to find them. Maybe it has a bit of sweetness and dark fruit notes. Maybe it's exceptionally chocolatey with a good body and hints of spice. There are many different flavor profiles that a coffee could have to score in this range. If you've had a solid pour-over from a specialty cafe, it's probably at least this good. Assuming it has a flavor profile that's suitable for espresso, you could use it as the base for a small milk drink where the coffee's flavor shows through to bring something extra to the cup that elevates it above a good quality non-specialty coffee.
An 88 point coffee is exceptional. Expect something that's both coherent (notes are clear and play well with each other) and complex. It makes you think "how can coffee taste like this?" It smells good, it tastes good, and it takes you on a journey that you remember when you're done. It likely exhibits rarer notes like florals and complex fruits in a way that blends sweetness with a pleasing acidity. Often, the notes are more specific and strongly evoke a particular, refined flavor (e.g. instead of tasting like "black tea" it has notes of "milk oolong", or instead of "citrus-like", it's "mandarin orange" or "yuzu", and instead of "floral" it's "jasmine and honeysuckle"). You'd probably want to drink this coffee brewed fresh without adding anything to it (unless you really know what you're doing).
A 90+ point coffee will almost certainly be one of the best coffees you've ever tasted in your life.
It's been really eye opening to encounter so many coffees of varying origins and qualities. I feel like I have a better reference now for what great (and terrible) coffee tastes like, and it helps me contextualize what I'm experiencing when I try a new coffee for the first time.