Cupping
Cupping is the coffee industry's standardized method for tasting and scoring coffee. Roasters, buyers, graders, and competitors all use it because it strips away nearly every brewing variable (no dripper, no pour pattern, no grind decision), leaving the coffee itself as the only thing that differs from cup to cup. When a green buyer in one country and a roaster in another need to agree on what a lot tastes like, cupping is the common language. ☕
#Why Standardize at All
A V60 brew reflects the brewer as much as the bean. Cupping removes that confound by fixing every parameter: a set ratio, a single grind, one temperature, and an identical steeping time across every sample. Differences you taste must therefore come from the coffees: different origins, processes, or roasts. That makes cupping a fair comparison and a reliable diagnostic.
#The Protocol
- Ratio: ~8.25 g coffee per 150 mL water (about 1:18), weighed per cup
- Grind: coarse, like sea salt, ground fresh one sample at a time
- Water: clean, ~93 °C, poured to saturate all grounds
- Cups: typically 5 per sample, to catch a single tainted bean
- Method: immersion; no filter, grounds steep in the cup
The sequence is fixed:
- Smell the dry grounds and record fragrance.
- Pour water over each cup and let it steep for ~4 minutes; a crust of grounds forms on top.
- Break the crust by pushing through it three times with a spoon while leaning in to inhale the released aroma (a signature, almost ceremonial step). 👃
- Skim the floating grounds and foam off the surface.
- Slurp from a spoon as the coffee cools, evaluating across temperatures.
#What Gets Scored
The SCA cupping form rates each attribute on a 6–10 scale; the sum, after deductions for defective cups, yields the cup's overall score. A coffee scoring 80 points or above is "specialty" grade, the threshold that defines the entire specialty category.
| Attribute | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Fragrance / Aroma | Smell of dry grounds and wet crust |
| Flavor & Aftertaste | The core taste and what lingers |
| Acidity | Quality of brightness; see Acidity in Coffee |
| Body | Weight and texture; see Sweetness and Body |
| Balance | How the attributes integrate |
| Sweetness, Clean Cup, Uniformity | Often scored as present/absent across the 5 cups |
Tasters describe what they find using The Coffee Flavor Wheel and the shared vocabulary, and flag any taints or faults that pull the score down.
An immersion cup at 1:18 is not how you would drink a coffee; it is a microscope. The flavors it reveals still predict how a coffee will behave in your pour over, which is why even home brewers benefit from learning to cup.
#Continue Reading
- How to Taste Coffee: the tasting mechanics cupping formalizes
- The Coffee Flavor Wheel: the lexicon used to score cups
- Building Your Palate: practicing cupping to calibrate yourself
- The Specialty Coffee Industry: where the 80-point line came from