I’m halfway through a two-week trip to Colombia. During this trip I’ve participated in nine cupping sessions in various labs across the country. As I’ve been cupping my way through Huila, Antioquia, and Nariño, I’ve reflected on what’s important during cupping sessions — the stuff most people overlook.
Below I’ve shared a list of reflections for both newbies and seasoned professionals on how to approach cupping more thoughtfully. This is not a how-to-cup blog, but a reflection on ways we can improve, lessons I’ve learned from getting it wrong, and insights from countless cupping sessions around the globe.
Every Single Coffee Deserves Attention
Sometimes I go into a cupping knowing exactly what I need to purchase. At other times, cupping is a completely exploratory opportunity. Both ends of the spectrum certainly exist, and in either situation you’ll probably encounter coffees on the table that just don’t interest you. You know right away you’re probably not going to purchase them.
And I want to begin by saying that’s OK. There are a variety of reasons not to purchase a coffee: it doesn’t fit the profile you’re looking for, there’s too much or too little volume, it doesn’t meet quality standards, or it lacks the necessary certifications. This is just a part of being in the role of a coffee buyer: parameters exist!
That being said, this does not give you the liberty to simply overlook or completely ignore any coffee on the table.
Setting up a cupping takes hours and hours of work. Every single sample must be prepared by hand. This means removing parchment, screen-size sorting, removing defects, taking moisture and water activity, writing all of this information down, and storing the coffee just for you to taste. The samples must be roasted, which can take countless hours and dedication. If that’s not enough, just consider the fact that every coffee you taste comes from a real human being whose work you’re about to evaluate.
With this in mind, the most thoughtless and selfish thing you can do is breeze past whatever coffees fail to immediately grab your attention.
It’s disrespectful and unprofessional. Every one of those coffees deserves your full attention. Doing this is one small way of honoring all of the work done before you put your mouth to the coffee. So yes — slow down, take your time, take good notes, and approach cupping thoughtfully. Who knows, you may be surprised by what you find. If nothing else, thoughtfully approaching each coffee gives you an opportunity to calibrate and provide meaningful feedback to your partners.
Cupping Blind is Best Practice
Like it or not, we’ve all got biases. There is no such thing as “objective” cupping, even when you go in to taste completely unaware of what’s on the table (which never really happens anyway). But nothing is worse than a cupping where every single piece of information is staring straight at you. You see the word “Castillo” or “Anaerobic” or “Gesha” and your mind immediately begins filling in the blanks:
- “It’s a Gesha, so it must be floral.”
- “Castillo never scores above 86.”
- “Anaerobics are always too winey.”
We all approach the cupping table filled with biases, assumptions, and preferences. That’s just human nature. And for that reason, if you want to score and judge coffees with the most accuracy and honesty possible, you should never know exactly what you’re tasting. I get it: you may not be able to escape knowing all the samples are from Ecuador, or that they’re all washed-processed, but you can avoid letting further preconceptions flood the arena of flavor.
In my own experience, it’s nearly impossible not to let biases creep in, especially when cupping in groups. I’ve cupped thousands of coffees over the last 10 years, and I still get nervous when cupping with new people. No one wants to be the outsider — not enjoying a coffee everyone else enjoyed, or scoring higher than everyone else. But knowing more about the coffees beforehand is only going to harm, not help.
If you want to be more accurate when cupping, practice cupping blind alone. Hone your palate, trust your gut, and believe in what you taste. That way, when you approach the table — even with other seasoned tasters — you’re confident in your own experiences, not reliant on secondary information to shape them.
Score Honestly
Scoring matters. It’s a method of recording and determining what’s higher or lower quality. It informs others regarding your preferences and tastes. It can aid in establishing price. Scoring can also become an opportunity for calibration and learning, especially in group settings. It can also become pertinent information that flows back to farmers, informing them of their practices. So scoring is no joke, and should never be taken lightly.
At the same time, I believe you should always be honest with every score you give. Because we can gain so much from cupping together, inaccurately scoring — whether inflating or deflating, for whatever reason — can be incredibly harmful to everyone in the supply chain.
There’s nothing more difficult than looking at someone and saying, “I don’t like this coffee,” when you know they love it. Telling someone their Pink Bourbon didn’t score high for you is difficult: it can feel like a betrayal, or even an affront to the work someone else has done. It can also be embarrassing or anxiety-inducing to be the one person who loves a coffee when no one else does. But what’s much, much worse is being dishonest.
There are plenty of good, even great coffees in the world, but maybe they just don’t fit the bill for what you’re looking for. Similarly, when seeking a specific flavor profile or quality level, you can’t approve something that doesn’t match expectations.
Cupping is an opportunity for mutual discovery, communication, and dialogue. It’s at the core of doing business as a buyer. If I decide to be dishonest, I’m harming my partners, my company, and putting myself in jeopardy. Word is bond, so be honest. Ultimately, I’m accountable for how I communicate with our partners. If the goal is to find coffees my company can purchase — coffees I can feel proud of, and pay a competitive price for — then scoring and calibration are everything. None of this can be accomplished if I’m not willing to stand by my own flavor experiences with a coffee.
It’s also worth mentioning that “faking it till you make it” when cupping is another ridiculous and harmful form of dishonesty. When I was still new to buying coffee I saw every opportunity to cup with others as an opportunity for learning and discovery. Sometimes I didn’t know how to score a coffee, or even if I actually liked it! When that happened, I told people I didn’t know how to score the coffee. In most scenarios, that’s completely acceptable, especially as a novice.
Most people, myself included, would rather hear that than see through the phoniness of over- or underscoring because you don’t actually have the skills to accurately assess the coffees in front of you. I’ve participated in far too many cuppings where someone is clearly under-skilled and unprepared, and then goes on to act as though they know the differences between qualities, profiles, and styles. I find that sort of inauthenticity unprofessional, tactless, and even offensive.
I’d tell anyone who’s new to coffee buying to learn. Learn from others, ask good questions, stay curious, and lean into being a newbie! There’s a freedom and flexibility that comes with being a learner that doesn’t exist nearly as much when you’re professionally purchasing at the highest levels, where decisions can have massive consequences or rewards.
Don’t Be Afraid to Score High
If we’re being honest, the 100-point scale for scoring coffee is profoundly broken. I’ve never scored a coffee below 75, and never higher than 95. So in my vocabulary, a 75 is really terrible: it’s filled with defects, damn near undrinkable, and is not specialty coffee. A 95, on the other hand, is basically perfection: it exceeds every expectation, and the memory of the flavors I experienced will reverberate in my memory forever. But really, I have 20 points available to me at any given time — 20 points to most accurately determine the quality of a coffee.
What I’ve found over the years is that many new coffee buyers are afraid to score high. Over the last year I’ve talked with a number of professional buyers who’ve said, “I don’t know how to score above 88 points.” My response is almost always the same: have you ever tried scoring a coffee above 90?
If a coffee is absolutely stunning — it makes you fall in love with coffee all over again, it’s a showstopper, it’s everything you’ve ever wished for — and you score it 88 because you don’t know what a 90 is like, then you’re absolutely fooling yourself. The “90+” category doesn’t exist until you make it. It’s not fake, it’s not phony. Especially for seasoned cuppers: you have to determine what your top score is, and that means actually giving that score to a real coffee.
All cuppers are Platonists: we all think there’s some realm where the perfect 100-point coffee exists, but as far as I’m aware, no one has ever scored a coffee 100. So in my opinion, that non-existent imaginary coffee cannot keep you from giving a screaming-high score to a genuinely smashing coffee.
Last December I cupped with a producer in Ethiopia. At one point I tasted a coffee that was singular: nothing I’d tasted before or since was anything like it. He asked how I would score it. I told him, “95.” He stood in disbelief, asking how I could score his coffee that high. I responded, “It’s just that good, I decided that right now. I love this coffee.”
I don’t regret that score — in fact, I’ll stand by it to this day. That coffee set a new bar for me. Why didn’t I score it 96, or 100 for that matter? I could have, but 95 felt proper in the range of scores I’ve given in the last three years. I think the “100” is still out there, and who knows, maybe I’ll score a coffee 100 sometime soon.
Clean Up
Offer to help set up and tear down. Clean up after yourself. Leave the space you’re in better condition than you found it. It’s small things like this that go far in building community. The professionals I look up to are those who are always going out of their way to be helpful and useful.
It’s easy to sit back, let others set up and clean up, and in some situations no one will bat an eye. But if you’re able, and there’s an opportunity to be helpful, go for it. Participate in more than just tasting!
A Final Note
Cupping and scoring coffee is an imperfect process. Unlike wine, which you can score professionally by opening a bottle, pouring a glass, and tasting, coffee takes so much more to “get it right”: the right water, the right grind size, the right sample roast. Go even further back and we could spend all day talking about how quality is created at the farm level.
Nevertheless, at its best, cupping has the ability to bring people together — to share knowledge, information, passion, concern, and care with one another. It’s a broken system, but it can do good if approached with a healthy dose of humility and collaboration.
Today I cupped three tables of coffee with friends I’ve known for years. They’re both coffee producers and exporters. We’ve communicated regularly for several harvest cycles about finding the right coffees for me to purchase. Last year was an exciting success, and this year we’re off to an even stronger start. The coffees I tasted today are wonderful: they capture the spirit of the place I’m in and have inspired me on a nearly spiritual level.
The positivity and success from this harvest has taken investment from both parties, and I’m sure there will be snags along the way. But cupping with my friends at 7 a.m. this morning as the world around us awakened was an amazing experience. Specialty coffee has no future without trust, humility, honesty, transparency, and commitment. And these qualities — which transcend flavor — are best nurtured around the cupping table.
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