Should You Slurp When Drinking Pour-Over Coffee? What Is Cupping Slurping and What Is Its Purpose?

If you spend time in coffee shops or have joined a cupping table, you've almost certainly heard that sharp "whoosh, whoosh, whoosh." To the uninitiated, it sounds like the noise people make while slurping noodles in Japan — as if to say the food is delicious. In fact, it's the sound of a deliberate technique used to taste coffee better, and it has a proper name: "slurping."

What Is "Slurping"?

Slurping means drawing coffee into your mouth quickly and atomizing it as you do. The technique originated at cupping tables, because it offers two benefits tailor-made for cupping. The first, as FrontStreet Coffee noted above, is better flavor perception. To showcase what a coffee bean inherently tastes like, you need to remove the brewer's technique from the equation — which is exactly what cupping does, extracting coffee with high water temperature, a coarse grind, and a long steep.

Cupping keeps human influence out of the cup, but its extraction efficiency is low, so the coffee doesn't taste as rich as a pour-over. Slurping compensates by amplifying those flavors. When you atomize the liquid, its surface area expands dramatically, so more of it contacts your taste buds and the aromas register far more distinctly. The atomized droplets also release more volatile aromas, which your retronasal olfaction picks up as you exhale. With smell and taste working together, you take in far more aromatic information.

The second benefit is cooling. Cupping water is poured at 94°C, and even after a four-minute steep the liquid still sits above 70°C — far too hot for your palate to work properly, since heat suppresses our perception of sour and bitter, which only become expressive once the temperature drops. Slurping pulls air in with the coffee, cooling it instantly so you can judge the cup in full. As the habit spread, more and more people began slurping their pour-overs too — which raises the obvious question: does pour-over coffee actually need it?

Should You Slurp Pour-Over Coffee?

Compared with cupping, pour-over brewing puts human technique back into the process and lets a coffee show off more of its character. And by the time the brew is done, the temperature has already dropped to a range your tongue tolerates comfortably — so there's no strict need to slurp just to taste the flavors.

That said, subtle flavors can still be hard for beginners to pick up, and slurping is a genuinely useful tool in that situation — provided you do it properly.

How to Slurp Correctly

Purse your lips into a thin line, then use a spoon or a small cup to bring coffee to your lower lip. Part your upper lip slightly and inhale sharply, pulling air and coffee into your mouth together. Close your lips and let the coffee coat your palate, then push the air out through your nose, paying attention to the flavors as they pass through your nasal cavity. That's the proper, scientific way to slurp.

One caveat: slurping is loud. In a crowded room, use it judiciously — unless you enjoy becoming the center of attention, which isn't always a comfortable place to be for the socially anxious.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Slurping shows its worth most with delicate, subtle coffees — exactly the kind FrontStreet Coffee's Washed Yirgacheffe delivers, with its clear jasmine fragrance, bright citrus acidity, and light, tea-like body. It's the classic choice for the V60, and a great coffee to train your palate on.

If you want more fruit to practice picking apart, try FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopia Guoji (Huakui), whose knockout tropical fruit aromas — strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit, even lychee — give you plenty of distinct notes to hunt for, or the Panama Esmeralda Red Label Geisha, whose elegant jasmine, citrus, and bergamot layers reward every careful slurp.