How to Cup Coffee

The art of coffee cupping! It’s one of the most important steps of roasting specialty coffee. Today we’re sharing the tools you need and the steps to cup coffee on your own!

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 the 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!

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 your coffee-loving friends. Or you can cup them labeled to get really familiar with different regions, varietals, and processing methods.