How to do coffee tasting or cupping

Question

I recently learned there is coffee cupping. I have always enjoyed coffee but do not think I have a developed palette for it or know much about it. How can I start to develop my palette and start doing some coffee cupping?

Answer 1

There's a lot of good information online to get started. A great one is this James Hoffmann video: How To Cup (Taste) Coffee At Home. If you're just starting out, he provides a common-sense explanation and method for basic coffee tasting that strips out a lot of the complexities used in professional or commercial tasting.

The gist of cupping is that it uses a simple brewing method that isn't influenced by the person's technique. Standardized conditions ensure that everything is brewed the same, in a way that produces properly-extracted coffee of normal-strength. The brewing method is similar to French press.

It adds the tasting method of slurping the coffee from a spoon. That removes more potential variation. Each sample is a uniform amount. The slurping action sprays the coffee around the inside of your mouth to stimulate the different taste and smell sensors in a uniform way that enhances your ability to experience the flavor and aroma components.

Coffee cupping has a home use in addition to comparing coffees or developing your ability to differentiate flavors. If you're just getting into exploring brewing methods and "recipes", it's easy for the experiments to produce brews that don't taste like what you expect. After a few of those, you start asking yourself, "what is this coffee supposed to taste like when it's properly brewed?" Cupping it will give you a good flavor baseline.