How Do We Cup Our Coffees?
Ahh the art of coffee cupping! It’s one of the most important steps of roasting specialty coffee. Join us for a little behind-the-scenes blog tour of a BonLife Coffee Roasters cupping…
Cupping coffee is an important tool for any coffee roaster, and we use it in several ways at BonLife.
We cup our own regular roasts- a good way to quality control and find tasting notes. We cup sample coffees- a good way to try samples of green beans and decide if we want to buy them. We cup our special competition roasts- a good way to hone in a special coffee and get it just right for a competition. And sometimes we cup a coffee from another roaster that a staff member picked up on a trip somewhere- a good way to broaden our horizons and see what’s happening in the coffee world.
So cupping coffee isn’t just an industry thing we do to look cool. It helps us roast our award-winning coffee even better!
We can’t lie, though, cupping coffee is a lot of fun! The more you do it, the better you get at finding tasting notes in coffee too. You can cup the coffees blind and test each other. Or you can cup them labeled to get really familiar with different regions/ beans.
So here’s a little how-to guide for you to take home and try your hand at a coffee cupping. Pro tip: a coffee cupping night makes a really fun activity for a group of friends!
Here’s what you’ll need:
20 grams of each coffee
cupping spoons (soup spoons will work in a pinch)
cupping cups or bowls
a scale
a grinder
a timer
a couple of glasses or mugs to hold cupping spoons
a kettle with hot water at 200 F
an extra cup to discard grounds and spit
Here’s what you do:
Fill a mug or two with hot water & drop the cupping spoons in there. You’ll use this hot water to rinse your spoons between each coffee.
Set up your cups or bowls in a row. Typically you want to try at least two different cups of the same bean. So if you’re tasting 4 coffees, set up 8 cups.
Grind your coffees to a coarse sea salt size, making sure to toss a few extra beans of the new coffee through the grinder after the previous coffee to clean it out.
Put 10g of each coffee in each cup or bowl.
Go down the row smelling each coffee. Give them a shake to stir up the fragrance as you smell.
Start timer.
Pour 180g of hot water over each coffee, going slowly down the row to stagger the start times and smell the wet aromas as you go.
Let it brew for 4 minutes.
Break the crust on each coffee in the order that you brewed them. To break the crust use the back of your cupping spoon, hold your nose very close to the surface and push the grounds back. The aromas from the coffee underneath the grounds will tell you a lot about the taste! Keep your spoon on the surface; you can push the crust back three times.
Go down the line with two cupping spoons to scrape the foam and any leftover crust off the top of each coffee. Don’t forget to rinse your spoons between coffees! Keep the spoons shallow, don’t disturb the bottom of the cup, and don’t take too much liquid off.
Now you can taste! Dip your spoon in to the coffee at the surface, get a good spoonful, and slurp it! The better your slurp, the more the coffee spreads all over your palate and the more you taste. Taste each one thoughtfully, and come back to coffees as they cool. You’ll start to get new flavors as the coffees change temperature.
Taste again. Take notes. Talk it over with each other. Find new coffees. Do it again. The sky’s the limit!
So there you have it: this is why we cup our coffees and how you can too!
If you live in the area, next time you see us cupping coffees at the cafe feel free to ask us more about it. If you live far away, you can always message us questions for more info. If you want to try cupping some coffees and need a place to get started, we recommend our coffee sample set! It will give four different coffees to try alongside each other.
Happy tasting!
