5 Things Learned in 5 Cuppings

by Ryan Brown, Founder of Facsimile Coffee

I selfishly started Facsimile because I wanted a good excuse to cup with experts from around the world. We recently completed the fifth live cup-along, and I’m in awe of how much I’ve learned already.

I took a moment to reflect on the past several months and a handful of the takeaways. Here’s what I found.

1.Consistency is king

The purpose and namesake of Facsimile is to provide coffee enthusiasts an exact copy of the experience of cupping side-by-side with experts. We take efforts in preparation to ensure that each set of samples is identical. We provide as much instruction as is reasonable so that each cupping bowl of a sample tastes the same.

But it’ll never be precise, and we know that. However, you can control that each of your samples is prepared and handled the same way. Ground the same, brewed the same, and evaluated the same.

This is especially important on any given cupping table of green samples, but also important from table to table, session to session. Eliminate all variables apart from the samples themselves, and you’ll have a more successful evaluation.

A song may sound different on different speakers, but you should still be able to tell the difference between “Hey Jude” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” no matter what you have available to you.

2. Sensory evaluation is comparative evaluation

As a coffee brewing method, cupping is inherently cynical. It readily trades quality of brew for reproducibility and assumes that defects are everywhere if you just look close enough.

Yes, cupping is designed 1) as an easily repeatable extraction process, and 2) as a means of more easily detecting defects and inconsistencies (by way of several, smaller brews).

But there’s a pleasant, perhaps unexpected byproduct of this pessimistic outlook. Cupping is hands down the best way to brew many samples at once, and brewing many samples at once creates a magical context for comparative tasting. This is no small matter. Drink a cup of any coffee and you will be immersed in its qualities, you’ll be very much seeing its trees, and not the forest. Give yourself several other coffees to taste before and after, and you’re giving yourself a broad view of the forest.

This comes up again and again during our live cup-along: the first sample often just smells like and tastes like, well...coffee. This isn’t some affliction of the novice. With my 20 years of coffee tasting experience, I habitually return to sample #1 to complete my evaluation. If I ever need to cup just one sample, I’ll find one or two other samples to put on the table alongside it to be sure that I obtain the benefit of comparison.

This is also why I cup incognito and scatter bowls across my cupping table. I gain very little from knowingly tasting the same sample three or four times in a row. I gain so much from unknowingly tasting them throughout the table in different contexts. (After I grind each sample, I place the same color sticker under each bowl and on the card or bag with the coffee’s information. Having done this to every sample’s bowls, I randomly scatter the bowls around the table, then reassign them numbers for my cupping notes. Upon completion of the evaluation, I check the sticker of each bowl, sort out any discrepancies, and finalize my scores.)

3.Official cupping forms aren’t used much

I’ve been using a Cup of Excellence form as long as I can remember for all coffee scoring. But, I don’t use it properly. I rarely score all individual attributes, and instead hack it to fit my needs. This was reinforced by the habits of the Stumptown cupping lab circa 2011, where we all did the same.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t alone and that there were other cuppers who didn’t use official cupping forms at all, or who used them in a hacky way, or who had designed their own.

If the Facsimile guest cuppers are any indication, I underestimated. While most of them have formal cupping training of one sort or another and all of them know how to use a standard 100-point scoring system and the SCA cupping form, not one of them routinely uses an official cupping form for evaluating green coffee.

Scott Rao tends to capture notes and intuit a score based on a nearly unconscious evaluation of the cleanliness, sweetness, acidity, and flavor. Gabby Wright is Q certified and has memorized the SCA cupping form. When she scores, she uses a notebook to capture coffee notes and a final score. Zakiya Mason and Charles Babinski use a proprietary form that separates sweetness, acidity, and then buckets everything else under “structure”. Petra Veselá and Gwilym Davies use a 6-point smiley-face system modified from barista competition scoring, with which they have abundant, diverse experiences.

And yet, I have been in sync with these experts across a variety of origins and qualities in cupping after cupping, in coffees ranging from 82 to 89 points.

4.Be clear about your goal for each cupping

A reason why official cupping forms are seldom used is that they don’t expressly address the goal of a given evaluation.

For example, Zakiya and Charles were coming to the cupping table looking for coffees they’d be proud to share with visitors of their cafés. The customized form they use instead of an official form is designed to answer--and explicitly asks--the question, “Would you serve this?”

Gabby cups with her roasting clients in mind. Scott cups to better understand how to approach roasting and extraction. Petra and Gwilym primarily cup in order to evaluate the success of their roasting.

If your goal is to give the coffee an official SCA or Cup of Excellence score, then I know just the cupping form for you to employ. If you’re cupping to purchase, to understand how a coffee may fit into a blend, or to showcase a range of qualities to a customer, consider how that should affect your approach.

5.Cupping results are a form of communication

Sometimes the most obvious detail can be lost in an elaborate, intimidating ritual. For example, it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully grasp that coffee processing techniques--washed, natural, and nearly every other version--were each created with the straightforward goal of preparing coffee to be stable for storage and transit.

Cupping may appear to be a series of steps that you need to precisely follow to be “doing it right.” While there’s some truth to this, and certainly unavoidable parts of cupping, the steps are a means to an end, and that end is an accurate, concise description of a sample that can be understood by someone else.

Cupping results are a form of communication, whether the recipient of the message is a farmer, importer, roaster, customer, or even your future self who won’t otherwise remember what it was like to taste that coffee.

The magic of cupping with others (as we do in Facsimile) is the value of having that communication in real time while the cups are still warm and in front of you.