Cuppy Questions

Cupping a coffee from Kenya

Cupping seems to exist as the standard for evaluating coffee, in which every coffee has an honest chance with least external interference possible. It also is generally used to set an expectation that one might experience in a coffee. The often impressive tasty notes written on a freshly purchased bag of coffee doesn't always converge paths with what you may experience at home, or perhaps even at the cafe in which you purchased it from. Cupping is attractive in many aspects: its parameters are easily kept stable between comparison of coffee, it gives you a heavy emphasis to determine aroma, and it also allows full potential without user mistake. Cupping provides a way that takes the absence of error out of most brewing methods, and it keeps the elements minimal so you can evaluate the coffee for what it is. My intrigue about cupping however, is why we use a method such as cupping to determine what people might find in a coffee, when in doubt the consumer isn’t going to cup the coffee and experience the same thing. Perhaps the consumer might actually cup the coffee, but cupping isn’t generally the way people prepare coffee to drink every morning. Maybe the fancy exotic words used to portray a coffee is for the sake of marketing, or maybe my taste buds are lacking, and I just can’t pick up the “fluffy, nougat, starfruit” notes as described on the bag. Without a doubt, I pick up some captivating flavors when trying new coffees, but very rarely would I agree on what the bag says. In a sense I feel like it’s a set up for disappointment, especially for the not as experienced coffee drinker. Someone more familiar on the other hand is more likely to average out the tasty notes along with the origin and the way it was processed for a better prediction of what’s inside. To see something like “loud, bright, tangerine,” tagged on a wet processed African coffee typically makes sense, and rides along with our intuition. But often enough I read things like “jaunty, cheer, buoyant” and just think to myself what a great day those people must have been having when they wrote this. With a thesaurus the limits are endless, and often come off as ridiculous. Indeed, sometimes I do find these strange adjectives riding along my pallet, but more often than not I’m in a whole other ball park.

What I do love about cupping, is not only the knowledge obtained from it, but the knowledge that gets shared during it. It’s really quite a social event, and while I’ve tried cupping alone, it is really quite unfortunate and dismal. After all, coffee is heavily communal and revolves around social interaction. And if more than two people can agree that a coffee tastes like brown sugar, then I suppose all the more reason to write it on the bag. Is cupping really that beneficial to helping the customer select a coffee? I don’t know, but it's definitely beneficial for education and analysis. This wasn’t supposed to question the cupping process, but instead dispute how we use the information we collect from it. I feel that you shouldn’t have to pull out a dictionary to comprehend a short summary of what you might experience in a coffee, but perchance that’s just me.