5 Coffee cupping training routines
by Cássia Martínez de Carvalho
This guide aims to collect exercises, techniques and elementary training routines. They are basic concepts but above all they are proposals of simple and effective exercises to get practice and develop your taste skills.
The intention is that this brief manual will be a useful and fun tool for all those who are curious about the sensory world and enjoy a good coffee.
Training exercises for your senses
Go out to eat at restaurants/cuisines that you are not used to. Yes, to taste coffees you have to broaden your range of tastes and try new combinations and ingredients that are not yet part of your daily menu. Strolling through the shelves of organic supermarkets you can also find an infinite number of foods that are not common in conventional supermarkets.
Eat and drink with attention by registering the flavors you perceive. The next time you go to eat, even if it is something you are used to, observe with a new interest the particularities of taste, texture and aromas in each bite. Try eating similar things and appreciate their subtle differences, such as between a tangerine and an orange, and try to record in memory the subtleties between the two.
Smell and eat blindly with friends trying to decipher what is what. Use the coffee flavor wheel as a guide and prepare a “tasting” of spices, fruits, chocolate… you can put a small amount of each element in an opaque pot with a lid and try to guess what is in each one. You can do this game by smelling and/or tasting, you have to be creative to get the best of each ingredient.
Tasting organic acids present in coffee. Many of them can be found in pharmacies for the elaboration of magistral formulas. Some of them are: citric, malic, tannic, lactic, acetic, tartaric, phosphoric acid… buy the minimum amount since the concentrations for training are very small. As a guide, keep the following in mind:
Remember, for this exercise as for any other coffee tasting exercise, always use mineral water, with a maximum of 125ppm.
You can also elaborate different concentrations of sugar water, with salt, caffeine, glycerin, phenol (also possible to find in pharmacies). Caffeine is mostly bitter, but be careful not to abuse its tasting as it is not healthy for the immune system to exceed the daily dose. Glycerin is tasteless but you will understand that it means a heavy and unctuous drink. Phenol is one of the most common defects in coffee, it has very unpleasant musty and medicinal flavors and odors. But then why do we want to taste phenol? Because you want to know how to detect it quickly and eliminate defective samples from a cupping table. Then you can mix dissolutions of, for example, sugar with citric acid + malic acid and experience what a fruit juice is, then add glycerin or make other combinations. there are no limits! As a guide:
Caffeine 2g/L
Glycerin 40 drops/ 500 ml
Sugar 10 g/500ml
Fenol 10 drops/500 ml
Prepared to taste coffee
7 Tasting technique and protocol
Once the clear descriptors have been identified and registered, and our palate has become accustomed to the multiple elements that make up the sensory characteristics of coffee, we can now venture into the tasting. At this point, it is interesting and practical for the success of our exercises, to establish a clear protocol and use it from the beginning so that it becomes a habit, being convenient, for example, to follow some etiquette such as not touching the cups, not talking during the tasting, walking around the table always in the same direction…
Take notes, taste accompanied and always compare. Whenever you have the opportunity to taste coffee with a professional, do it! Little by little you will be immersed in their knowledge, you will begin to recognize the coarser characteristics of the coffees and then you will appreciate the more subtle ones. If you cannot taste coffee with a professional, taste with friends and discuss the attributes found.
Modify the order of the samples on the table and taste again. It often happens that a good coffee seems mediocre next to an extraordinary one, or that an ordinary coffee seems extraordinary next to a defective one. Even if we try to be neutral and fair when tasting, our brain falls into the sensory trap of lateral inhibition.
Do blind coffee tastings and others do not.
Be a blank canvas. Taste without expectations or suggestions about what you already know about each coffee or about your skills as a cupper. Taste without the self-demand to describe the coffees in a certain way, be spontaneous and expand the lexicon of description beyond the known. Little by little you will polish your vocabulary to communicate with coffee professionals in a more direct way.
When trying to describe a coffee it tricks your brain into thinking that what it is drinking is NOT coffee. That helps you come up with better descriptions than just “coffee” to your tasting note.
At a tasting table repeat one of the samples (without knowing its location) and see if you are able to evaluate and describe the repeated sample in the same way.
Do memorization and triangulation coffee tastings.
Memorization tasting: Taste a table of, say, 8 samples blind. Number them from 1 to 8. Reassemble the tasting table with only 5 of the previous samples, choosing them randomly and naming them from A to E. See if you are able to match the 5 samples with their corresponding samples from the first tasting table.
Triangulation: three cups of coffee are created, two of them are identical and one of them is unique. The goal is to use your taste and smell skills to identify the special cup among the three. Create 6 to 8 different ‘triangles’ on a training table. You can combine different benefits from the same farm, same benefit from different countries, same region, different varietals, the options are endless and you can go from easier to more challenging.
Give up smoking (or at least do not smoke for a few hours before tasting).
Never use perfumes or colognes (even mild ones, aftershave, strong deodorants, scented creams) during the tasting. In addition, you spoil the tasting for your companions.
Coffee Tasting
The roasting of the cupping coffees are lighter than those of other types of extraction, this is done because with a clear roasting you will be able to detect the defects quickly without compromising the virtues that a healthy cup of coffee can offer you. If you do not have the possibility of obtaining roasted coffees for cupping, buy filter roasted coffees or the lightest roast that you can find in your roaster.
- Determines the capacity of cups in milliliters (ml).
- Weigh the grains at a ratio of 8.25 g per 150 ml of water.
- Use at least two cups per sample (to verify uniformity, all cups should taste and smell the same).
- Purge the grinder with the coffee to be cupped.
- Grind each sample individually just before the tasting (the grind point is quite coarse, similar to the cold brew preparation, one option is to stop by a specialty store to get a sample of the grind point).
- Have at hand, pitchers of warm (mineral) water with the tasting spoons, napkins and a stopwatch. Nothing else! Remove everything superfluous from the tasting table.
- Smell the coffees dry and observe the fragrance of each cup.
Infusion: preparation
- Heat enough water to near boiling point. Make sure you have enough water to fill all the cups at once.
- Hit the timer and start filling the cups to the brim one by one in order. Once you start filling a cup don’t stop until it is full, if you stop half way you will see that the crust doesn’t form very well or it breaks on its own before the time is up.
- You have 4 minutes to smell the aroma of the coffees before breaking the crust. For this reason, if you are just starting out in cupping, I advise you not to put more than 6 samples on the table, so that you have enough time to analyze each sample carefully.
- After 4 minutes it is time to break the crust. Bring the nose to the cup and with the tasting spoon stir the contents 3 times, taking the spoon to the bottom of the cup. It is 3 movements with the spoon, neither 2 nor 4, 3! Once a crust is broken, it will not break again. Sometimes it happens that the crust goes down by itself before breaking (this can happen for various reasons), but you should ignore it and break it just like any other cup.
- Immediately after the breakage, remove the foam floating in the cup with the help of two tasting spoons. Always remember to rinse the spoon before immersing it in another cup.
Tasting. Technique and routine
- Approximately 5 minutes after breaking, the coffee is ready to be sipped. A practical way to know if the temperature is adequate to start tasting is to hold the cup in your hand (as long as your hand is clean and free of creams and perfumes) for a few seconds. If it doesn’t burn your hand, it doesn’t burn your mouth. Go ahead!
- If you suck the coffee from the spoon with firmness and determination you will see that the coffee covers more surface area of the palate and you will have a better perception of taste, touch, etc. The noisy sound is only a consequence of the strong aspiration, it is not mandatory for a good cupping.
- It is time to analyze and evaluate. Taste the coffee at different temperatures, let it cool little by little and verify what changes and what remains. You will see that there are coffees that lose attributes as they cool and others that are more consistent. The main attributes to be analyzed are:
Clarity: it is the clarity of the beverage, the absence of traces of imperfections.
Sweetness: Is coffee sweet?
Acidity: high, low, malic, citric, complex, weak…
Tactile sensation: it is unctuous, silky, dry, astringent, dense, creamy…
Flavor: any flavor memory is valid, although the flavor wheel helps us a lot to specify the descriptions, since these are the most common flavors found in coffees.
Aftertaste: short, persistent, revealing new flavors, leaving you wanting more…
Balance: Are all of the above attributes in balance? Is there anything that leaves the cup unbalanced?
General: do I like it or don’t I like it?
4- Training routines
It tastes all types of coffees. Anonymous (practically all the ones in the supermarket are anonymous), against origin coffees (with name and surname), exceptional and commercial, with defects, blends, old coffee against freshly roasted, Arabica against Robusta (discover for yourself what each one offers you).
Read and research about tasting and the science of taste (look for scientific sources or articles by professionals you admire).
Participate in tastings of other beverages or foods (wine, olive oil, chocolate… whatever you want) that helps to develop the skills of a good taster.
It is difficult to define and separate precisely what is exercise, technique and training routines, but that is the least significant thing here. The important thing is to get on with it, practice and invent new ways to experiment with tasting!
Have fun!
This article is written by our expert coffee taster Cássia Martínez Carvalho for Fórum Cultural del Café.