The Ultimate Guide to Coffee Cupping at Home
Today, our goal at Blue House Coffee is to make it simple to create a coffee cupping at home, to allow you to try multiple varieties of our coffee beans side-by-side. We’ll fill you in on anything and everything you’ll need to do a coffee cupping and walk you through step-by-step. We’ll also teach you what to look for as you taste different coffees which will allow you to understand your opinion on each different coffee as a whole.
Before we dive in, what is coffee cupping?
Coffee cupping is a process which allows for a side by side comparison of different coffees, so you can notice the nuances of varieties that you wouldn’t notice otherwise! One good analogy to explain a cupping’s purpose is when you see siblings separately versus side-by-side. Separately, you may think they look close to identical. When you see them side-by-side, this is when you are able to see the many differences in features that distinguish one from the other. In cupping, instead of comparing heights or hair color of a pair of siblings, however, you’re looking at the various characteristics of what makes a specific coffee unique. The goal of that? You get to learn about different coffees, but more than that, you get a unique opportunity to figure out what you like and don’t like. When various coffees are next to each other, it is quite a bit more evident which you prefer. There are many technicalities with cupping, many specific things people look for, but if you are able to determine to determine your preferences in any sort of manner, that is a win for a coffee cupping!
How can we help you cup easily and successfully in your own kitchen?
Alongside this blog that details the process of cupping for you, we’ve released our coffee sampling gift box, which includes everything that you’ll need to do a cupping that you don’t already have at home! So, what’s in the box?
Five 3oz bags of freshly roasted whole beans of a variety of our most popular beans:
A descriptive sheet outlining each of these five varieties in detail; this will provide you a basis of the flavors in each bean that you can try to taste during your cupping, or as you simply just try all of them out. As you decide which beans you prefer, it will also help you to understand your general coffee preferences. Do you like fruity flavor profiles or nutty profiles, do you like light or dark roasts, etc.?
A flavor wheel that describes visually the variances of coffee flavor profiles that you may taste as you cup them or brew them at home. This is useful as you taste the coffees to put words to what you’re tasting!
A coffee cupping chart that will allow you to record what you are tasting in an organized way and come to an overall comparative conclusion about the varieties of coffees in your tasting.
A wooden Blue House Coffee sticker that can serve as a sweet souvenir of your cupping adventure.
What materials do you need for a coffee cupping?
Freshly ground coffee, multiple varieties (if possible): Coffee is more flavorful the more recently the beans were ground, so as fresh as possible will give you a much easier time distinguishing the subtleties of the different coffee beans. Comparing and contrasting is the key to coffee cupping, but you also have to be able to manage brewing multiple varieties, so we’d recommend cupping about 5 different beans.
Coffee cups: However many varieties of coffee you plan to cup, have that many containers to use for the cupping. There is no requirement for what to use; you may use a small bowl, a cup, a mug, etc. While your choice in container certainly depends on what you have available to you, try to find containers that you have multiple of, or that are similar in size. This will make it easier to maintain the same ratio for brewing and provide a consistent brew/temperature during the cupping.
Water kettle: While some brewing methods like a pour-over require precise pouring of water and may call for a goose-necked kettle, anything that will allow you to heat/boil water and pour it safely and easily into your cupping containers will do the job. This may be just a standard kettle or some creative means of getting the job done.
Spoons: Instead of sipping coffee like you normally would, cupping coffee requires slurping the coffee from a spoon. Grab as many spoons as you have coffee varieties, plus one extra (or just two, if you can rinse them throughout the process). Aim to get similar spoons if possible.
Gram scale (semi-optional): If you own a gram scale, this is 100% going to help you achieve that proper and standard ratio for your different coffees. If you don’t own a gram scale, there are some workarounds to get you where you need to go. Know that a tablespoon of light-roasted coffee (such as the Costa Rican, Tanzanian, and Ethiopian) weighs about 7 grams, that a tablespoon of medium-roasted coffee (such as the Mexican) weighs about 6 grams, and that a tablespoon of dark-roasted coffee (such as the Colombian) weighs around 5 grams. Also, take note that 1 ml of water is exactly 1 gram of water. If you have a fluid measuring cup for ml and a tablespoon, there may be some slight error, but you’ll definitely be in the ballpark of where you want to be ratio-wise.
Let’s Get Started!
When you do a coffee cupping, you don’t brew each variety in the way you would on a normal morning. The brewing technique used for cupping is meant to provide some standardization between all of the cups, due to a minimal amount of human interaction with it. The process is also aimed to make it easier to brew multiple varieties of beans at the same time. Written out is the process geared toward people doing a coffee cupping at home, to simply just compare different coffees and understand their preferences better. The process may still sound technical, but this is all for the reasoning of keeping each cup standard to the others so you can get a better understanding of how the varieties of beans relate to each other. That being said, do your best and have fun!
Prep: Gather all of your materials and figure out how much coffee and water to use. A good ratio to stick to here is 60 grams of coffee per 1000 grams of water. Take this ratio and adjust it to fit the containers you are using. For example, most standard coffee cupping bowls would hold around 250 grams of liquid. But for this process, also note that you will brew the coffee with the grounds in the container, so leave yourself room for the grounds. For example, if your cup could hold 250 grams, we’d recommend 15 grams of coffee and 200 grams of water. Once you have all of the materials, including freshly boiled water, it is time to brew!
Brew: Place each variety of coffee grounds into its own container and pour the previously decided upon amount of hot water into each container. Don’t stir, just let it be for four minutes (we recommend setting a timer for this).
Post-Brew: Once four minutes have passed, stir the “crust” on top of each cup to allow floating grounds to sink to the bottom of the cup and to stop the brewing process. After stirring, grab an extra spoon to get anything off the top that is still floating about, discarding the material in an extra cup or in the sink. What this does is allows you to just taste the pure coffee and not any grounds as you compare coffees. Between cups during this process, try to switch spoons or at least rinse them off so you don’t mix any different coffees together. Once you are done with this, we recommend waiting a few minutes before tasting the coffees so that none of the nuances of the brews are missed due to an excessively hot temperature. If you would like, this is a great time to smell the different coffees and see if you are able to notice any distinct aromas from any of the brews!
Taste: It’s finally time to taste! Further down, we explain the various aspects of each coffee we recommend trying to taste, as well as how to read and use the flavor wheel and cupping chart included in the gift box. For now, we’ll just go over practically how to taste. Take a spoon with some coffee from one of your cups and slurp! That’s right, slurp! The idea here is that when you do this, it allows the coffee to hit all the different taste buds on your tongue so you can appreciate any and all of the flavor nuances in the brew. Try to use a different spoon for each brew, or simply rinse off your spoon between brews; the goal of this is to start fresh for each brew and to not mix flavors. Even though you let the coffee cool a little before starting to taste, the coffee will continue to cool as you go. As it does, keep tasting the different brews as the flavors and qualities will continue to change.
What do you look for as you taste the different coffee varieties?
There are many different characteristics that you can look for as you taste the different coffees, but for our purposes, we will outline a few key ones. In the coffee sampling pack, we have included a form for coffee cupping that includes these different key characteristics and provides an easy way to record your thoughts. If you have this, we recommend pulling it out, and we’ll walk you through everything that is on there.
Fragrance/Aroma: The aroma, or fragrance, is the first thing you’ll be noting about the coffee. Why do we want to note the aromas? The smell of coffee during the brewing and drinking provides so much to the coffee experience. If it’s a positive fragrance, this will add to the brewing experience. If it is negative, this wil take away from the overall experience. To observe the aroma of a coffee during the cupping process, you can truthfully smell the brews at any point, but if you want to get the most aroma out of the brew, or if you are following the chart in the gift box closely, there are two specific times that you’ll want to smell the brews. First, before you add the water to the grounds, when they are (ideally) freshly ground, this will be a very fragrant stage in which you’ll be able to determine aromas easily. Second, right as you break the crust as the brewing phase is done, this is another great time to go after the aromas.
Flavor: When tasting flavor, there are a few options on how to think about it and how to talk about it. On the cupping chart there is a scale for flavor in which you can decide simply how you feel about it quantitatively. On the descriptive sheet, we’ve already identified many tasting notes for the coffees provided, so if you are new to coffee cupping, see if you can identify those notes in the brews in front of you. If you can, that’s great! If you are unable, that’s fine too! Note which brews you like the flavors and which you’re not the biggest fan of, and compare them to the descriptive sheet! In the future, just from those results, you’ll be able to identify in the future which coffees you may or may not enjoy. If you wish to distinguish different flavors and tasting notes on your own, we suggest utilizing the flavor wheel to give you some guidance. Start with the segments close to the center of the wheel for broad notes and as you keep tasting, you can move outwards on the wheel to get more specific with the notes!
Aftertaste: This descriptor is basically what it sounds like; what taste does the coffee leave in your mouth after you’ve swallowed it? This, similarly to aroma, is a separate topic altogether from the taste of the coffee itself, but just as important. When you make coffee, aroma and aftertaste are just as much a part of the experience as the actual coffee is, despite all the attention that the brew itself gets. You can enjoy a coffee’s taste and feel, but not enjoy the aftertaste of it!
Acidity: Acidity can bring on all sorts of negative connotations, but in reality acidity within a coffee can be good and it can be bad. There exists a positive acidity which can bring a crispness and freshness to the flavor, not a negative sourness to the coffee. This is one of the aspects of coffee for which we rate quantity and quality separately. There can be a large amount of acidity, but this does not mean the same thing has having a very positive acidic nature to it, nor does it automatically make it a negative trait of the coffee.
Body: Another way to describe a coffee’s body would be its texture or its mouth-feel. This descriptor has nothing to do with the flavor of a brew and everything to do with how a coffee feels as you sip it. Let’s diverge to talk about food for a moment. If you were to eat a nice chicken noodle soup, and then immediately eat some lobster bisque, what is the main difference? The flavors, of course, but beyond that there is an overwhelming difference in texture and fullness as you eat each. In this example, a chicken noodle soup would be described as having a thin body, whereas a lobster bisque would be described as having a heavy body. This same goes for coffee. All coffees will fall on that thin to heavy scale of body, and in addition to that, you can rank the quality of that body. Was the thin body positive or negative? Was that heavy body positive or negative?
Balance: The balance of a cup of coffee refers to how the flavor, aftertaste, acidity, and body work together. Do any one or two of those factors overwhelm the other, or do they meld together in a balanced manner? The more balanced the factors, the higher score the brew would receive.
Sweetness: There is no simple sugar in coffee which is what we typically associate with sweetness. Instead, this sweetness rating refers to how the various aspects of coffee lend themselves to a natural sweetness. A coffee naturally will not taste like you’ve added sugar to it, so as you’re tasting for sweetness, try to avoid looking for that flavor. Instead, trust your instincts on what this form of sweetness will taste like, and use comparative tasting to your advantage. As you taste different beans next to each other, it will become apparent that one coffee is, in fact, sweeter than the rest.
Uniformity and Clean Cup: These factors are designed on the cupping chart (along with sweetness) to be compared among five cups of the same bean. Uniformity refers to how similar each of those five cups are to each other. If you only have one cup of each coffee variety, don’t worry about this. Clean cup refers to the absence of any unpleasant flavors. For this, as well as for sweetness, if you only have one cup for each coffee variety, just give the section an overall score for each variety. If you are moving through the whole chart officially, then clean cup would be the category that would affect whether you take away any points in the Defects category. If you notice anything unpleasant (rather than a flavor you don’t enjoy, this would refer to anything that shouldn’t exist in the brew like a burnt flavor), you can take off two points for a minor defect and 4 points for a major defect.
That’s really all there is to it! Hopefully we’ve been able to make coffee cupping accessible to all of you! That being said, we’d love to hear what you think of the activity, and of all the beans you tried! Send us an email with your favorite variety you tried and why you loved it! Or, go to one of the farmers markets we serve at and talk to the server there about your experience! Was there anything that frustrated you about the process? Any particular flavor profiles you would like to try again in the future? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you!
