Glossary: Cupping

The pro­ce­dures used to eval­u­ate cof­fee beans.

Cof­fee beans pre­pared for cup­ping were roasted so light that most peo­ple would be dri­ven away by the sour­ness from its brew. The pre­cisely weighed cof­fee ground are kept in the han­dle­less glasses for cup­per to eval­u­ate its fra­grance. After­ward, rightly-proportioned hot water is poured in the glasses for aroma evaluation.

Four min­utes after steep­ing the cof­fee ground, cup­pers will spoon down the float­ing ground to bring out the nose and the bright­ness of cof­fee. Until this stage, cup­pers only sniff above the glasses — no sip­ping, no hold­ing the glasses. Scoop­ing out the floats, cup­pers deliver a spoon­ful of liq­uid out of the glasses into their mouth with max­i­mum aer­a­tion as pos­si­ble — slurp­ing the liq­uid with noise. The pur­pose is to bring the liq­uid back to the nasal cav­i­ties where the olfac­tory mem­brane resides. It is impor­tant because noses are actu­ally a much more sen­si­tive sen­sor than tongues. The fla­vor, body and after­taste are eval­u­ated in the slurp­ing stage.

At last, cup­pers will give cof­fee scores base on a 1–100 point scale. Although the per­fect is 100, scores are rarely higher than 90. In many regions where the cup­ping are joined by buy­ers, pro­fes­sional cup­pers and local judges, the cof­fee scored above 85 are qual­i­fied for auc­tions to fetch higher prices.