Cupping

Overview

This tutorial is designed to help people who struggle with tasting and describing coffee flavors. It provides a basic introduction to coffee tasting techniques, highlighting the importance of comparing coffees with others and practicing to recognize distinct flavors. The tutorial also includes a simple exercise to help distinguish key tastes like sweetness, acidity, and bitterness.

Basic Taste Training

• First step in tasting involves a simple exercise using water, sugar, citric acid (lemon juice), and orange peel to distinguish key flavors:
  • Sweetness: Taste water with added sugar to identify sweetness.
  • Acidity: Use water with lemon juice to identify acidity.
  • Bitterness: Taste orange peel or darkly roasted coffee to recognize bitterness.
  • The exercise emphasizes avoiding confusion between acidity and bitterness, as they are often mistaken for one another.
  • Bitterness in coffee typically comes from darker roasts, while acidity is a sharper sensation felt on the sides of the tongue.

Coffee Comparison

• It’s recommended to prepare and compare more than one coffee for tasting:

  • First coffee: Instant coffee, a dark-roasted Robusta variety.
  • Second coffee: A freshly roasted, high-quality Kenyan coffee with a lighter roast.
  • Third coffee: A high-quality Honduran coffee (Catuai variety).

• Before tasting, smell the grounds to observe the differences in aroma:

  • Instant coffee has a mild caramel scent, with little aroma.
  • Kenyan coffee smells fruity, while the instant coffee has a simpler "chocolate-like" scent.

Key Tasting Elements

1. Bitterness

   • The Robusta instant coffee is very bitter, both due to the roast and the coffee variety.
   • The Kenyan coffee has almost no bitterness and is instead high in acidity.
   • The Honduran coffee has moderate bitterness, balanced with acidity.

2. Acidity

   • The Kenyan coffee has very high acidity, often compared to fresh fruit.
   • The Honduran coffee has lower acidity compared to the Kenyan, but still higher than the instant Robusta.

3. Sweetness

   • The Kenyan coffee shows a balance between sweetness and acidity, like ripe fruit.
   • The Honduran coffee is quite sweet with a creamy texture.

4. Mouthfeel

   • The instant coffee feels watery and thin.
   • The Kenyan coffee has a smoother, slightly oily mouthfeel.
   • The Honduran coffee feels creamy, much like cream compared to skim milk.

5. Aftertaste

   • The instant coffee has a short aftertaste that is bitter and unpleasant, with burnt, rubbery notes.
   • The Kenyan coffee leaves a fruity and sugary aftertaste that is refreshing.
   • The Honduran coffee has a long-lasting aftertaste, with sweet, chocolatey, and nutty flavors.

Conclusion

In coffee tasting, it is essential to focus on bitterness, acidity, sweetness, mouthfeel, and aftertaste. Recognizing these characteristics can help distinguish between coffees and describe flavors accurately. Taste training should extend beyond coffee, incorporating various foods and beverages to sharpen the palate and improve tasting skills.