Notes from a Cupping Table

A roaster in our neighbourhood invites us in one morning a week, most weeks, to cup with them. The room smells of the last two roasts and the espresso the head roaster pulled before we arrived. Eight small glasses stand in a line on a long wooden table, unmarked, arranged in the order they were roasted. It is quiet, and mostly stays quiet, and we get to work.

We wanted to write down what happens at that table, and what does not, because a lot of the mystique around professional cupping is not really mystique. It is a repeatable set of small habits that anyone can borrow.

What cupping actually is

Cupping is the industry-standard method for evaluating a coffee. Twelve grams of coarsely ground coffee, freshly ground, in a small glass. Water at a specified temperature — usually around 93°C — poured directly on the grounds to a fixed weight. A four-minute wait. Then, with a spoon, you break the crust of grounds that has floated to the top, and the aromas that release in that moment are the first real information you get from the cup.

After the break, the grounds sink. You skim off the remaining foam and the floating grinds, and then you taste — with a spoon, slurping loudly, because slurping aerates the coffee across your whole palate at once. That is not for show. It is the fastest way to get the aromatics up into your olfactory system while the liquid is still hot.

You taste it hot. You taste it warm. You taste it cool. You write down what you notice.

What professionals do that most of us do not

They cup blind, and they cup side by side.

Blind because expectations are cheap and confidence is free — a coffee you know is from a famous farm will taste like a famous farm to you, whether or not it deserves to. Side by side because the palate is a comparator, not an absolute instrument. A cup that seems fine on its own reveals its edges — a hollow middle, a short finish, a bright but unbalanced acidity — the moment you taste it next to another cup that does those things differently.

They also cup with a scoring form, and they write things down. Not because the scores are meaningful in isolation, but because the act of writing forces specificity. Fruity is not a note. Fruity — dried apricot, some peach skin, no obvious berry is a note. The first one you cannot remember tomorrow. The second one you can.

What we take home

We do not, at home, need to cup like a professional buyer. But three habits from the table travel well:

Taste blind, sometimes. Once a month, ask someone else in the house to grind and brew two coffees at the same recipe and hand them to you in unmarked cups. You will discover, immediately, whether your preferences are about the coffee or about the story.

Taste side by side. Even when we are drinking a single coffee, we sometimes brew half a cup and set it next to a saved cup from yesterday, or from last week’s bag, or from a different origin. The comparison teaches faster than any single cup can.

Write one word down. Not a review. Not a paragraph. One word — the most honest description of what you actually taste in that specific cup, on that specific morning. Tomorrow, when you brew the same coffee, see if the word still fits. Over a month you will assemble a small private vocabulary that describes what your palate actually notices, and that vocabulary will be more useful than any tasting-note wheel.

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The roaster we cup with says that the best cuppers in the industry are the ones with the most words, and the most restraint about using them. She is not talking about vocabulary size. She is talking about the discipline of noticing one specific thing and describing it, without inventing a story around it. It is, she thinks, the same skill in a lot of other places. It just happens to be the skill this room is for.