A Cupping of Coffee
I realize that in recent months
I have written often about coffee. It's a subject I've become particularly fascinated with over the past year. So with apologies to the tea drinkers in the readership, I'm going to broach the subject again. It wasn't planned
- it's just how the beans aligned.
This most recent line of thinking came to the forefront a few weeks ago after watching the first episode of Season 2 of
Making a Chef, the show on Mississippi Public Broadcasting featuring Starkville's own teen chef, Mark Coblentz. On that first show, he spent time with local roasters Kenneth Thomas (Umble Coffee) and Blair Edwards (The People's Cup) learning all sorts of things about how coffee is roasted commercially, how you can roast it at home, and some techniques to maintain standardization of flavors.
The standardization issue is something that I've known about for a while - at least the way it's done - but I never associated the technique with the term. If you are even a little bit of a coffee nerd, you've probably heard about cupping. If not, perhaps you've read posts from other coffee geeks or even just the labels on bags of gourmet coffee and seen phrases such as, “Notes of raisin, ruby red grapefruit juice, dark chocolate, and an oak barrel after a steady rain.” Those descriptions come from cuppings.
Maybe these tasting notes look familiar, but instead of coffee they sound like descriptors of a good red wine. Wine tastings are pretty common, and wine connoisseurs can differentiate between blends using similar techniques. The word “terroir” emerged out of the wine industry as well. Terroir is a French term that basically means “the flavor of place.” In other words, the flavor of wine is dependent on the soil the grapes grew in, the rain that fell on them, the climate, the topography, etc. And now the same term (or at least the same idea) applies to coffee, even foods.
For example, with coffee, the flavor of the beans can depend on the elevation of the plants. I've never seen a thriving coffee plant in Mississippi, but I had a couple of them in my yard when we lived in a mountainous area in the Middle East. That area happened to be a little closer to the equator than we are as well. When I heard Mr. Thomas mention those two factors (elevation and latitude) as key components of coffee flavor, it made sense - I've seen it with my own two eyes.
Later, on Making a Chef (read that as if someone with a deep voice is saying it), they did a cupping. I'll get into the details of how that works in a bit, but the ultimate goal of tasting coffee in this way is standardization. You may have a favorite blend, favorite roast level, even a favorite roaster, and you expect that bag of beans to pretty much taste the same every time you buy it. What I learned by watching the show (and you should, too) is how many elements can effect the roasting process. Cupping is how they check the consistency of that process.
I've actually come full circle in the last year or so. Back in the fall, I read a book called The Monk of Mokha, about a Yemeni-american who is working to bring Yemeni coffee back to the world markets. In the process of his journey, he had to learn to grade specialty coffees and develop a palate that could tell the difference between notes of raisin and nougat. He eventually became a Q Grader, which requires incredibly intense training and testing to become certified. But that's his story, and if you are into coffee, it's a book I recommend.
My story is that I had all these terms in my vocabulary, but no experience - until last week. 929 Coffee Bar is offering cupping opportunities about once a month or so, and Daughter and I went up to try our hand at it. Actually, we tried our nose and our mouth at it, but you probably figured that out already.
We started with cups of coffee grounds that we sniffed to get our first impressions. We tested 3 different coffees, and we did notice some slight variations. Next they added hot water to each cup and let it sit about 4 minutes - that's the bloom. We then broke the crust with some fancy spoon work and took another sniff. At that point, the hot water extracts different aromas from the beans, so the smells may be similar, but more complex.
Next we got to sip. Or slurp. The Matriarch would have been embarrassed had I made such a noise with my drink in public as a child, but this was serious coffee business. This time I was the grown-up, and Daughter (who is kinda-sorta grown up herself, though I'm not quite ready to admit it) was doing the slurping right alongside me. In fact, she mastered the slurp. The idea was to suck about a teaspoonful of coffee through your teeth and spray the inside of your mouth - all the tastebuds - with the freshly brewed coffee.
So now we've sniffed twice, tasted at least once, then moved down the row to compare notes from blend to blend. One had notes of orange blossom and citrus, another had stone fruit, raisin and a syrupy mouth feel, and the third had a mix of green grape, clementine, and milk chocolate. Or so they say.
Those who are not certified Q graders say it's okay if you don't taste the same notes. You can still enjoy the cup. But if you really want to learn, you just have to drink more coffee.