Coffee Cupping Standards and Procedures! What Are the Key Considerations for Coffee Cupping? What Is the Purpose of Cupping?

Cupping, as a method, emerged in the late twentieth century, which makes it considerably younger than other coffee extraction methods.

Initially, people developed this method simply to quickly inspect the quality of commercial coffee. As time went on, though, everyone realized that it is minimally affected by human factors and can give relatively objective evaluations of coffee. Consequently, its use gradually expanded beyond green bean traders and coffee roasters. Both the upstream and downstream coffee industries now employ cupping to test bean quality, and even world-class coffee competitions have established dedicated cupping events.

Why FrontStreet Coffee is discussing cupping

Why bring this up now? Because recently many friends have visited the shop to ask FrontStreet Coffee about cupping methods, wanting to host their own sessions at home or in their shops to evaluate coffee. So today, FrontStreet Coffee will share the cupping process and important considerations in detail. Then, when you have free time, you can try it yourself and experience the difference between coffee during cupping and what you normally brew.

Equipment needed for cupping

FrontStreet Coffee will start with the equipment. If you plan to host cupping sessions long-term or frequently, you might consider buying professional cupping bowls and cupping spoons, which make cupping more convenient. If you only want a simple experience, though, any container and any spoon will do.

Besides bowls and spoons, we also need several cups of clean water and several paper towels. The clean water is for rinsing spoons that have touched coffee, ensuring that residue on the spoon will not contaminate the next cup, while the paper towels absorb the water remaining on the spoon after rinsing, avoiding any dilution effect on the coffee. (Like this.)

If cupping in an unfamiliar environment, FrontStreet Coffee highly recommends preparing your own small cups and scooping coffee into them with a spoon before drinking. This way, the session stays a tasting rather than a large-scale sharing of saliva. Finally, there is the cupping score sheet, which comes in two types, SCAA and COE. You can find and print the corresponding sheets according to your needs or preferences.

Cupping considerations

1. It is best not to wear perfume or apply strongly scented hand cream during cupping, as these affect aroma judgment.
2. To prevent subjective influence, it is best to conduct blind tasting.
3. Try not to voice your subjective opinions on the spot, for the same reason as above: it easily influences others.
4. Be bold and score according to your own feelings.
5. Cupping should ideally be conducted at least 8 hours after the beans have been roasted.

Cupping parameters

Unlike other extraction methods, cupping has standardized parameters. All cupping sessions use the following:

Coffee dosage: typically 11g-12g
Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:18.18
Grind size: 75% passing through a #20 sieve
Water temperature: 94°C
Water quality: TDS of 75-250ppm
Steeping time: 4 minutes

Without further ado, let's begin cupping.

Cupping process

1. Smelling the dry aroma

When beans are ground into powder, the aromatic compounds originally trapped inside begin to volatilize outward in large quantities. What we need to do at this moment is smell the aroma.

Because the increased surface area of the grounds accelerates that volatilization, we need to control our timing. It is best to finish smelling the dry aroma within 10 minutes. Olfactory fatigue can set in during this period; when it does, we can take a deep breath of our own scent to clear it before continuing to smell the coffee.

2. Pouring water and smelling the wet aroma

After the dry aroma, we can start pouring water. Use 94°C hot water to pour to the specified amount, then begin to experience the wet aroma of the coffee.

Note that from the moment we start pouring for the first cup, we need to start the timer, and when breaking the crust we need to proceed in the order the cups were poured.

3. Breaking the crust

After four minutes, we start breaking the crust. This step requires a spoon; using the back of the spoon, draw three circles on the surface of the coffee liquid to gather the grounds together.

4. Removing the grounds

After breaking the crust, take another spoon and use both hands to scoop out the floating grounds from the surface. The best way to confirm success is to check whether any foam remains on the surface. If it does, the removal was not clean enough. A small amount of foam will not have much impact, but a lot of foam calls for another pass, because foam holds large amounts of fine particles and easily leads to "one sip of coffee, one sip of grounds."

Note here that after each removal of grounds, the spoon needs to be rinsed with clean water and dried with a paper towel to avoid contaminating other samples.

5. Tasting

Once the grounds are removed, we can begin tasting. First, scoop out the coffee liquid with a spoon, observe the color of the brew, then start tasting. From high temperature to low, try to experience each stage several times. Both conventional drinking and slurping are acceptable (slurping is best during the high-temperature stage to avoid burning your mouth).

Likewise, after each time you scoop coffee with the spoon, the spoon needs to be rinsed to avoid flavor cross-contamination.

When the tasting is complete, you can begin scoring and then exchange thoughts with one another. Communicating at this point is no longer influenced by others, and everyone can confidently share their experience from the session.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Cupping is the fairest way to compare beans, and it rewards coffee that is balanced and clean from the first sip. If you like a sweet, low-acid cup, FrontStreet's Brazil Queen Estate is grown in the world's largest coffee-producing country from the distinctive yellow Bourbon variety, and after medium roasting it shows creamy peanut, chocolate, toast, and sugarcane aromas with a soft sweetness, working well as pour-over, in a Moka pot, or on an espresso machine.

For those who prefer a touch of fruit, the FrontStreet Strawberry Candy Gesha blend pairs a honey-processed Costa Rican coffee with a washed Panamanian Gesha from two well-known regions in Central and South America. Medium-roasted, it delivers both a tangerine-honey character and a rounded sweetness, and it suits cold brew, pour-over, and espresso alike. As an everyday option, the FrontStreet 2013 Sun-dried Typica, a representative of Chinese specialty coffee, is medium-roasted to keep the traditional Yunnan small-bean balance of nut, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot notes, at a very reasonable price.