Making a cupping form

(This post was originally intended to be the first for a blog over at Spot's Official Page, but we're doing some reformatting, look for some official-type-posts from me over there.  In the meantime, didn't want to let this one languish, because I'm pretty excited about this cupping form.)

There always seems to be one area of coffee and coffee preparation that stands out to me for a given time period.  Last year was the “Year Of Use Scales All The Time, For Everything”: getting obsessive about figuring out the relationship between the taste of brewed coffee (and espresso) and the actual mass of coffee and water used to get there.

This year, if I had to pick a theme, it would be: “Cup Everything, All The Time.”

I like doing things by the numbers.  If I’m baking something at home, I like the recipe to specify every ounce, every temperature, every time exactly—it’s a way for me to get a handle on it even if I’m not the most confident of bakers.

Learning about the objective parameters of good coffee has allowed me to brew coffee, and pull shots, a little more by the numbers. Getting a grip on the basics of brewing allows one to quantify some of the important parameters; just being consistent with how much coffee, how much water, and the brew time is enough to take you a long, long way towards significantly better coffee.  And you can do that with a decent scale and the stop-watch function on your phone.  I’m hoping to get even more quantifiable data on brewing this coming year, using a refractmeter and maybe a better way to talk about ground particle size.

All that said in praise of quantification, though, quality is really where it’s at: the subjective experience of what’s in the cup.  Being in control of your basic variables is a great starting place, but it’s no guarantee that it will take you someplace tasty.  And the tools most of us have at our disposal—a scale, a stopwatch, a thermometer—are incredibly crude compared to our palates.  The human olfactory and gustatory abilities, our senses of scent and taste, are fantastically precise and complex.

Something I say a lot in my trainings is: you can’t just go through the motions and assume that good drinks come out the other side.  I never trust that my current technique for making a cup of coffee in the morning, or pulling a shot of espresso in the café, is working that day, until I’ve had a taste.

The barista competition this last spring, and various spro/brew-downs, have really opened my eyes to how much fun “rapid dialing” is: getting a new coffee, making a shot or a cup with it, and having to use your sense of taste to quickly decide what you want to change in your preparation to improve the final beverage.

In addition, I’m always trying to improve my ability to accurately describe coffee, which makes me think a lot about what I’m actually tasting/smelling, even when it’s not coffee.  I approach apples, beer, and mustard a lot differently than I did before I got serious about coffee.

So, although I’ll probably always be a “by the numbers” guy, and not some virtuoso who can just wing it, this year I’ve really tempered that with focusing on taste, and realizing that the information I can get with my palate is way more intense and, in many cases, way more relevant than any data I can get with other tools.

Working in the roastery, that dichotomy—numbers vs. taste—has been driven home a thousandfold.  I can start with a green coffee that hopefully I know a lot about—what varietal it is, where and how it was harvested and processed, maybe the altitude of the farm and how that affects density.  (It’s remarkably hard to get all that info for every coffee, and something we are always pressing for).  And we can specify and record a lot about how it roasts: how big the batch is, what the loss percentage out is, and the drop temperatures. When the bean goes through certain phases in the time/temperature “recipe” is important and quantifiable, particularly when it reaches “first crack”. There’s even a special color system, the Agtron scale, to specify how dark it is at the end.

But none of that tells me how it tastes.  We always hope to figure out how all that information correlates to the taste, but we’ve still got to taste it.  And, in the roastery, that has some pretty big consequences.  Are we happy with the roast profile?  Can we use this coffee in a blend?  How do we describe it for customers?  When we’re sampling a new coffee, we have to figure out: do we like this enough to spend thousands of dollars on it, enough to put our name on it?

So, tasting the coffee is pretty serious in the roastery, and we want to make sure do it in a way that’s serious, that provides some definite feedback that we can use, and that is fair to the coffee.  The best coffee in the world will taste awful if you brew it wrong, on the one hand, but on the other hand we want to make sure that the way we’re brewing doesn’t obscure defects.  Cupping is a formalized way of tasting coffee that tries to minimize variation in brewing and tasting technique as much as possible, so you can actually get a good idea of what’s going on in that coffee.  Cuppings work better as a group activity, because multiple people are more likely to catch everything going on in the cup.  And while people’s individual preferences vary, it’s remarkable how easy it is to reach consensus on a score with a small group of cuppers.  When I was at the MANE conference this past October, one of the cupping instructors put it very well: “The best evaluation won’t come from one supertaster; a group of experienced people with average taste abilities will do a better job.”

To be really useful, a cupping needs to be accompanied by a form that everyone fills out separately, so you can compare notes at the end, and to make a record for future buying/roasting/brewing decisions.  (One of the biggest skills in coffee, I’m realizing, is just having a long memory of tastes and coffees you yourself have experienced; there’s no way to fake it or just read a book about it.  I imagine that’s true to some extent for wine and the culinary arts as well.)

But cupping forms are rough!  In a few different ways:

• They are often clunky and crammed full of things to fill out.
• That can make them intimidating for people to use, or difficult to fill out properly.
• They need to balance objective and subjective evaluation along a few different axes.  Just because you’re tasting something doesn’t mean “it’s a matter of taste.”  A good cupper can separate intensity and quality from personal preference—but both are important to record.  At the end of a cupping with the roastery team, the most important question is: “are we happy?  Do we want to buy this, do we want to sell this?”
• They need to yield some kind of score, probably numeric, but trying to cram the real world in a box always winds up shaving off corners more than I’d like—and can change the way you think about the subject in the first place.

There’s an additional quirky bit with cupping specialty coffee—by definition,  “specialty grade” is supposed to be the top 20% of coffee, quality-wise.  That means that on a 0-10 scale, none of the coffees in Spot’s roastery should average out to less than 8—which means that I get pretty nervous marking any score less than 6.  But a “10” acidity, for example, means I am literally having a hard time imagining it could be any better, which means I’m going to mark it very rarely.  So even though it looks like a 0-10 scale, it’s very rare we’ll be marking outside the 6-9 range—and that in turn means we need to zoom in on those points, give half points and quarter points and so on.  It’s easy to forget sometimes that even the worst coffee we have on hand, if it’s specialty grade, is leaps and bounds ahead of genuinely bad coffee, the stuff we never even buy.  (Which is one reason I try to drink bad coffee every once in a while—bad chain coffee, ancient grocery store stuff, instant, etc.: helps keep perspective).

All those issues in mind, I’ve known for a while that we need our own cupping form to fill out and keep on record.  After looking at the SCAA form, the Cup of Excellence form, Coffee Geek’s, Intelligentsia’s, etc., I had an idea what I wanted, but none of them were quite what I thought was appropriate.

So!  This week we’re going to be testing out the fairly simplified cupping form I’ve made.  It tracks:

• Aroma/Fragrance: the dry/wet scents.  10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity.  The complexity of coffee’s taste is primarily derived from volatile aromatics (gases), so scent is a major factor in appraising a bean.
• Sweetness:  if it ain’t sweet, it ain’t good coffee. 2pts per cup. We do sets of 5 samples per coffee, so if all 5 are sweet it will be 10pts.
• Acidity: Maybe the most commonly misunderstood term, acidity in coffee is a good thing; it’s the bit that reminds us that this comes from a tropical fruit! 10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity.
• Body: Not a taste per se, this is the tactile “mouthfeel” of a coffee.  Along with acidity, one of the core features of any coffee.  Can range from thin or watery up to heavy, buttery, syrupy. 10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity.
• Clean: pretty self-explanatory, it’s the absence of dirty flavors (“earthy” if we’re feeling generous), and the clarity of the cup characteristics. 10pts.
• Consistent: Extremely important to us as buyers/roasters, since an inconsistent coffee can leave customers wondering what’s going on when it changes without us noticing.  2pts per cup, so if none of them are noticeably different from each other (whether or not we think they’re good), that’s 10 points for consistency.
• Finish:  The “afterglow” of a coffee.  A good finish either lingers pleasantly or vanishes cleanly.  10pts.
• Balance: How well the different parts play together, particularly acidity and body.  Coffees with fairly mediocre qualities can still impress if they are well-balanced.  10pts.
• Defects: This is the hardest category for me right now.  There are a number of well-known, well-defined, definite defects that can occur in coffee for a number of reasons…and I haven’t encountered them all yet.  A good example would be the “potato” defect that broke my heart out of a Burundi last spring.  In this section, I’m just leaving us space to take off some points for things we can definitely point to as being “off.”
• Overall: The cupper’s personal, one-number evaluation of the coffee.  10pts, multiplied by 2.

Add all those up and we get a score out of 100, with room for comments on specific flavors or things we noticed. I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to build a better library of cupping records, to match up against buying and roasting decisions.

It sounds pretty dry, I know…but cupping coffee is one of my absolute favorite things about my profession.  Actually, cupping vies with Chemex & espresso as my favorite way to DRINK coffee, it’s so much fun—you really get the feel of a coffee from start to finish, from all angles.  And it’s incredibly useful and vital to us as craft roasters.

Cupping sounds geeky, but there’s a really interesting thing that happens when you’re serving coffee to lots and lots of people: big groups of people are better at tasting things than any one person.  So what we’re doing, by getting very technical and focused in a cupping, is to get a feel for how the coffee will be perceived once it’s out being served to customers.  Is it ready, is it good enough, how do we talk about how good it is?  That’s what we’re after.

I run cuppings for new employees as a training exercise, and we’ve done a few public ones connected to jams and throw-downs.  With our new roastery facility coming this spring, look for a lot more chances to join in!