Coffee Tasting — From Zero to Hero
Note: This post is intended for folks with zero experience and it is meant to be a very thorough step-by-step explanation. If you have some familiarity with coffee cupping, you can skip to the parts that apply to you.
Background (TL;DR)
Many regular coffee-drinkers are just trying to get through the morning rush and spend little time thinking about the work that goes into their beverage. This is surprising, considering approximately 400 million cups of coffee are consumed daily in the United States.
With that in mind, how does one know if they are drinking a good (or bad) cup of joe? Roasting coffee beans is both an art and science that is completed by industry professionals every single day. A tasting technique known as coffee cupping is an integral part of this process to provide quality coffee based on a series of scored evaluations. For the barista knowing how to taste their coffee can be beneficial in them creating exciting recipes and exotic combinations.
For the average consumer tasting or cupping sessions have been known to be intimidating or just not interesting enough. For many of us, just getting that caffeine kick might be enough, even at the expense of bitter or not very pleasant sensations.
However, learning how to distinguish the nuances of coffee can lead to more informed purchasing (as well bragging rights with your friends). We ensure you once you try coffee tasting first you might get hooked! Coffee tasting it’s a actually a fun process that involves all your senses!
The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has developed a helpful form to make your own freshly brewed and cupped coffee right in the comfort of your home. This form is also highly effective for roasters and baristas who are looking to perfect their craft.
Intro to Coffee Tasting
What exactly is coffee cupping anyway? This tasting technique, evaluates different types of roasted coffee. Through this process, professionals can test the flavor, aroma, and uniformity of their roasts before serving to customers.
Some of you might seen at their neighborhood coffee shop a coffee wheel similar to this one. Well those are some of the attributes your coffee might have as you taste it! Coffee professionals might brag how well they know their attributes or how their wheel is bigger than their counterpart. There’s no official coffee tasting wheel.
The takeaway is that coffee is a pretty complex drink and you should definitely open up your senses and use your descriptive capabilities to define what is happening as you taste coffee. Consensus is needed to try to be as accurate as possibly with your cupping. That is why coffee tasting is often seen as a group exercise. You can invite your coffee lover friends!
🚨 Important Note 🚨
We will be adding scores to our coffee as we taste. If it’s your first time you could skip when we score. If you wanna score with along this tutorial, you have two options: You can download and print the SCA cupping score, or you can use our free-to-use coffee cupping app.
Also you can always refer to the SCA website for any outstanding questions. If you are using our free app, it should be pretty intuitive to use. Stay tuned for a tutorial, and iOS/Android version coming soon!
Getting Started
You don’t need to go anywhere to get started with coffee cupping. The tools you will need to start cupping coffee can be in your kitchen. Essential tools are a grinder, scale, spoons, glasses, and hot water. As you get better you can refine your tools and get cupping spoons, fancy grinders, timer and a kettle but you don’t really need all that to get started.
Not pictured but essential is an extra cup. Why? Because you could be tempted to taste more than one coffee at the same time. So this third cup is actually your “spitter”. Besides saving you from over-caffeinating yourself, actually you do the tasting with your mouth so your stomach is not very important in this process. Although important, we would not judge you if you chug your coffee as you do the tasting.
It is also recommended to do the tasting on top of a cleaned up table on a well-lit and well ventilated room. You don’t want external/unwanted factors to affect your sensory experience. If that means your kitchen or dinning table, yeah great choice.
Using SCA’s form, or our app, each of the following evaluations are scored on a 6–10 point scale with intervals of 0.25. A cup’s aroma, acidity, sweetness, taste, and uniformity are all evaluated through this process.
With all this in mind, let’s get to cupping!🚀
Step 1 — Setting up the Baseline
Get your favorite coffee and do make sure you have whole beans. Whole coffee beans should be weighed prior to cupping to reach the appropriate balance. Put your scale to measure grams. Then measure about 14 grams of coffee per cup, which would allow for a regular 8oz cup of water that we will add later. You can add less coffee if you want, but read water to coffee specifications here. For simplicity we are starting as you make your daily regular size coffee.
Before grinding and tasting our coffee we should establish our baseline playing field which would inform what score range our coffee will fall on.
- “Good” Coffee: In this step you will assign individual 10's to uniformity, clean cup and sweetness. Why? We are assuming you are tasting coffees you actually like so they should have a baseline score as being a good coffee. If it’s a bitter coffee with no sweetness, unless doing a crazy experiment, or you are a professional in the industry; it would not make sense moving forward pass this point if this standard is not met.
- No Defects: In both the app and the form, your coffee can be negatively impacted by defects. We are establishing the baseline so we assume your coffee is “good” and has no defects. Unless you are in the industry, we assume your coffee should have “zero" defects.
With this baseline our coffee should start with 30 points. Yay!
⚠Important⚠ — Since we have a “good” coffee we will reduce our scope and score on a scale of 7 to 9. The extreme scores are more used in professional settings for coffee buying or for extremely rare, award-winning coffees. Those 9+ coffees are a beast of its own worth covering in a separate post. You are more than welcome to use the whole scale, but as a beginner we recommend you following our recommendation.
Step 2 — Fragrance/Aroma
With the baseline established let’s get to tasting! It is recommended that coffee is grounded right before beginning the cupping process. Make sure your grind is medium size, again what you’ll normally use on a coffee machine. After our coffee is properly weighted (got back to Step 1), let’s begin by getting a sense of the aroma before infusion. So let’s smell our coffee!
At this stage you can take notes of the following attributes:
- Roast Level: Take a note of the level. Is it dark, medium, light. This is a qualitative score to your perception.
- Fragrance: This is the dry part of the fragrance/aroma score. Take some qualitative notes. Want some inspiration for words to describe the fragrance. Always refer to the coffee wheel of your choice. There are even fragrance/aroma wheels out there. They are just used to get inspiration in what you are sensing.
Now we are ready to do the infusion. With a temperature of approximately 200º F (93ºC), almost boiling hot water is then poured directly onto the coffee grounds in the cup. Let the beverage steep for about 3–5 minutes before tasting (it will be hot).
When the infusion and cup temperature is suitable, we can now taste for aroma and do a score for fragrance/aroma.
- Aroma — You could smell and score the aroma of the coffee. We get the aroma by what is called as breaking the crust. This is done by moving away the crust in a wave fashion with the convex part of spoon. This part will seem very ritualistic and will expose a lot of aromas. Get ready do be blown away (sensory wise).
When you are done do a your overall pointing for aroma/fragrance. Then make sure you remove all the coffee ground from the top layer of the cup. You can use two spoons to remove them. We do this because we will be ready to taste soon!
Helpers: You didn’t like the fragrance? Well 7 point scores might be suitable. Is it an enchanting aroma? Maybe 8+ scores. Always record and note what is happening as you score. Qualitative notes are as important as regular pointing.
Step 3A —Flavor and Aftertaste
The next two sections pretty much go together. We just separated them for explanation purposes.
We are ready to taste our coffee! We will now be scoring flavor, aftertaste, acidity and body as you try the coffee.
At this stage always remember to clean up your spoons. Have your cup with water handy and a towel so you can keep it clean at all time. This is more more important if you are tasting more than one coffee at the same time.
There are many factors affect the overall flavor of the beverage. Here you can use the coffee wheel (or your imagination) to creatively identify how can you describe the flavor you are experiencing when you gulp. Don’t forget to make notes. Does it taste like hazelnut or vanilla? Add those impressions.
When you approach the spoon to your mouth, let it just sit on your mouth before spitting. After you give a score to flavor (from 7–9) you can move to scoring aftertaste.
Aftertaste is scored after you spit (or drink) the coffee. This should be a pleasant sensation for a higher score. If you get a burned or bitter sensation and you don’t like it, it can mean a lower score. This part is purely personal and you can be creative in scoring.
Since we recommend doing this as a group, you might have several coffees lined up. So make sure you clean up your spoon as you move to next coffee.
Helpers: If you ever go to a cupping session, you might notice people slurping as they taste. Slurping is totally normal and actually encouraged. By slurping, the coffee will adequately “spray” all your taste buds in your mouth. Giving you a fuller tasting experience.
Although this is normal, that doesn’t mean you need to compete with your colleagues for the loudest slurp. Don’t let that distract your actual tasting of the coffee!
Step 3B — Acidity and Body
Remember that these sections go hand by hand at the same time.
In fancy coffee shops, you might hear words like acidity and body been thrown along with fancy decorators. Now it’s your chance to score for these attributes yourself!
- Acidity — The intense, complex flavors of the beverage are often due to its acidic content. The acidity could also be greatly impacted by the roast level. Usually a higher score is described as “bright” or “pleasant” when consumed.
- Body — Score the body based on the consistency and feeling of the beverage when you are drinking it. Body can be pretty philosophical to explain but think as body being how the coffee captures your whole mouth. That is why we hear coffees having “chocolate” attributes when having a pleasant body. Do not underestimate body for acidity, often high scored coffees have a great body (you know what I mean).
Helpers: You probably will have no issues identifying acidity, but body is a thing of its own and can be tricky at first. Take as much notes as you can. The qualitative aspects will inform the character of the coffee and will help in the discussion section of the tasting experience. So don’t forget to mark the intensity and body level aspects along with your scores.
Before you move to the next part, you can go around the table a couple of more times. Taste the coffee(s) again to refine your scores and notes. Slurp as you wish. Do not to discuss with your peers at this point since we aren’t done yet.
There’s a lot more than can be said about body vs acidity, but that it will be a topic for another post. So at this point you can tap yourself because you have done all the heavy lifting of coffee tasting!👏👏
Step 4 — Balance and Overall
If you are using the SCA form you will notice that we only have two boxes left. These two boxes is where we lean back to reflect on what we tasted and give some generalized scores.
- Balance — A balanced cup will ensure all of these factors complement each other. Thus, this score is based on how the overall flavors are affected based on the other aspects. Think about the balance score as it relates of the balance between acidity and body.
- Overall — Here’s were you could give those extra points for a particular coffee you really like. Here’s is where we would take all attributes into consideration. Overall will be either same as your balance or a bit higher. Do not deviate more than +0.50.
At this point you’ll start recognizing the coffee(s) that have won your heart ♥. Feel free to take as many qualitative notes as you want. Even though the coffee will be cold by this time, you can do final tasting rounds if you want.
Helpers: In this reflection phase you should take into consideration any outlier scores. Did you score very low on flavor but high on body? Think again and re-score. Remember attributes past aroma/fragrance go hand by hand. As you gauge your coffee scores look for deviations of more than 0.50. Re-score as necessary.
Caveat: Did your coffee had high score for aroma but low on flavor. Average coffees can have great aroma but weak body, excellent coffees can have ok aroma and higher body. Don’t be tricked by aroma. Actually tasting it is where the magic shines.
Final Score and Discussion
NOTE: As we have not taken into consideration defects and had a baseline score, we will not be deducting points. Once you get more confortable and you want to go through the process from green coffee to roasted you can assess for baseline and defects. Here’s a more in depth explanation of scoring with these deductive attributes.
As you already have all the scores, you now can calculate the final (total) score out of the sum of individual scores. This is a purely arithmetical operation which will give you a two digit total score.
I got the final score, now what? Any beverage that receives a score lower than 80–82 can be considered below specialty grade. Did you score a coffee labeled as specialty by the label actually lower? Don’t think you are doing it wrong. Yes there could be things you missed, but your perception matters. There are many factors that affect the quality of the coffee including when it was roasted, so think about those aspects as well.
Let’s talk about it!
At this point is where the group will have a discussion. Talk about your impressions, and go through each score together. If you are getting started, have fun with it and make some bold assumptions don’t be afraid! While it is not required, try to reach consensus among the group about the qualities as you compare scores.
What’s Next?
Test and perfect the sample until you have discovered your favorite quality cup of freshly brewed coffee. You could mix coffees, play with ratios, different roast types. The sky is the limit.
Many of your neighborhood coffee shops might have coffee cupping events. Make sure you check with them and sign up! It could be a great way to meet other coffee aficionados or just brag about your newly acquired sensory skills 😎.
Conclusion
We must not forget that coffee tasting in itself has roots as a ceremonial practice so don’t think you are doing something out of the ordinary. Also, by gaining more knowledge about tasting coffee, it will allow you to demand a better coffee. As a consumer, it is essential to know what you are getting out of a product, especially when ingested into your body. You saw how this technique is also necessary for baristas and roasters that want to provide their customers with the best cup of coffee possible. Regardless of your situation, incorporating this process is sure to impact your daily cup of joe positively
The coffee cupping (or tasting) technique is commonly used to ensure the production of high quality coffee. It is also a great way to develop fun and unique drinks through trial and effort or just learn a new hobby. Whether you are a barista, business owner, roaster, trader, or simply an avid coffee consumer, knowledge of this process is essential. Cupping allows you to have a complete understanding of the beverage you are consuming on a regular basis.
Now you can go and thank your favorite coffee professional or shop for their amazing work in giving you quality brew!
