Daniel's World of Coffee

Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

These are some of the most common mistakes I have seen in cupping labs in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

I have a friend who is a professional taste-tester and product-tester. She works in all kinds of foods, like crackers, chocolate, wine, TV-dinners, soft drinks, and yes, even coffee. A few years back she was in charge of training some experts for a panel she was putting together.

To test her subjects, she put together a little trick, making cherry gelatin with yellow coloring. When she served the yellow gelatin to the panel and asked them to write down what flavor it was, most of the tasters wrote "lemon," a couple wrote "banana," and only one of them wrote "cherry."

Think this is a one-time incident? Check this out:

In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like "excellent" more often for the Grand Cru, and "unbalanced," and "flat" more often for the table wine. — Wall Street Journal

If you think you are immune to this effect, you're wrong. No one is immune. If you know ahead of time what you are tasting, your opinion will be influenced by your preconceptions.

And yet, people still put together coffee cuppings ignoring this principle. It's okay to do an open cupping if it's just for fun, obviously. But if you are seriously trying to get useable data from your cupping, IT MUST BE BLIND.

There is no way around this. And no, you are not an exception to this rule.

Just to be clear what I mean by "blind": the identity of each coffee should be hidden to as great a degree as possible. Most times, of course, you will know you are cupping 20 Panamas, or 8 coffees from the same roaster, or whatever. This level of knowledge if usually unavoidable. But you should have no idea which is which. To achieve this level of ignorance, use codes for each coffee and make sure to order them randomly.

Ideally, you won't even know what category of coffee you are tasting. That's always the most interesting. But it's pretty rare to not have at least some idea what the category is.

The easiest way to make a cupping blind is, of course, to have most or all of the cuppers out of the room when the organizer sets up the cupping and gives the coffees a code. But many times you will be the one who is setting things up and at the same time you are the one hoping to do some evaluation.

There's a simple way to get around this. Just double-code the coffee. Imagine I am setting up a cupping with one other friend, and we both want to score blind. I will write down one set of codes. So a coffee from the farm "Finca Alfa" becomes 001 and "Finca Beta" becomes 002, etc.

Then I leave the area and my colleague comes in and re-codes the samples. "001" becomes "282" or some other random number. "002" becomes "991" etc. She makes sure to mix the order of the coffees.

When I come back in, I have no idea what is what, and neither does she, since she never saw the original list. We both cup completely blind and our data is therefore much more reliable. Then, at the end, we trace back through our double-code and re-establish the identity of each coffee. Easy peasy.

If you are not doing this, you might be having fun cupping, but you're not learning anything about your coffee.

Incidentally, I have noticed that 99% of all espresso-tasting that goes on in the specialty coffee world isn't even remotely blind. Everyone who tastes the different espressos knows exactly what he or she is tasting. Why people think this is a maximal way to evaluate their products is beyond me. (In order for it to be even half-way useful, the taster would have to be someone other than the barista, and he or she would have to be sitting somewhere away from the espresso machine so as not to have any hints about what's going on. Really you need at minimum three people: one barista, one "server" to act as liaison, and one taster... ideally you should have several tasters). This is really a topic for another post as espresso-tasting presents unique difficulties.

But in straight cupping it's very simple and straightforward. If you are not doing it blind, you're not really doing it! So now, are you a professional, or aren't you?

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

Cool New Sample Roaster

I got the chance to play around on a cool new sample roaster today. The machine is manufactured by Taehwan, in Korea. The brand name is the Proaster.

Proaster had a shop roaster up and running at the Roaster's Guild retreat in Oregon last week. They already offer larger batch roasters. This week they paid a visit to Boot Coffee in California and helped install this two-barrel sample roaster.

Good-looking machine. It took only a couple of hours to hook up the gas and electricity. The machine is surprisingly light, but as you can see below, the actual machining and manufacturing is high-quality. Below you can see the interior of the machine, viewed from behind with the back panel taken off.

The batch capacity for each barrel is anywhere from 100 grams to 200 grams. That's a good size for sample roasting, as you typically receive 300 or 350 grams per sample from a producer or importer.

We had a bit of trouble calibrating the thermocouples exactly, but that's hardly a surprise considering the thing was shipped all the way from Korea. In general, it was a pleasant experience roasting on this machine. Even the "bad" batch of coffee (the first roast we tried, with miscalibrated temperature readings, which went too fast overall) turned out with a nice flavor in the cup.

Many roasters who are just starting up their businesses agonize over how to deal with sample roasting. A shop roaster can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Few companies can afford to invest another $8,000 - $15,000 on a sample roaster. The Proaster sample roaster is priced significantly lower (though still not cheap!) and so far the results have been very nice. Of course, it will take more time to reach a completely-informed opinion. But so far, so good!

Sometimes it's the little things that can make a difference. This machine has an innovative design for the doors that allow for discharging the beans. When the machine is empty, you can look inside and see the interior design of the drum. Pretty cool.

We turned some students loose on this machine, just throwing them into the deep end of the pool, and (smart people) they were able to come up with some pretty well-developed sample roasts right off the bat.

Common Cupping Lab Mistakes — Smelly Cups

You're focused in on the coffee, you're about to write something brilliant on your cupping form. You're reaching for your pencil as you tuck your head to the side and spit into your cup. Boom. Plastic nasty reek. You've lost the brilliance.

I have set up hundreds of cuppings in over fifty different venues (I lost count somewhere), in ten different countries, from New York City to to mountains of Harar, Ethiopia. There have been cuppings in fancy restaurants, inside of tents, in world class laboratories, and hooked up to a car battery. Every situation is different and probably none is ideal. But there are certain recurring themes.

A friend recently asked me to write up a list for putting together his cupping lab. I wrote my "dream list", in which money and scarcity was no object. It was kind of fun, actually.

Rather than go through an entire list here on this blog, I am going to share with you a few of the most common problems that I've encountered in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

Spit cups are an afterthought. It's often the last thing you need in your cupping lab before you're ready to go. In many cultures it's common to use spittoons, and if you have an old-school rotating table top with chairs and sinks, you can spit in the sinks. But most cuppers in North America, and most cupping situations on the road, call for individual spit cups to be held by the cuppers.

These can be disposable cups, or ones you wash and use again. In either case, it's crucial that they don't have a strong smell — Ideally they don't have any smell at all.

For disposable cups, I prefer paper cups, the kind that most coffee shops use for "to-go" coffee. They actually do have a bit of a smell to them, but it's really only activated with hot liquid (the famous paper-cup smell that all to-go coffee takes on). If you are just spitting into the cup, it's not noticeable enough for it to be distracting.

Plastic cups can work too, but clear plastic cups are pretty gross because the slimy stuff inside is visible to all.

Some places use metal cups. Finished stainless steel works well (though they make a loud noise when you spit in them!). What's worse is tin cups or other rough metals. Not only do these cups have their own metallic smell, they tend to pick up the smell of used coffee around the interior surface, which can be quite distracting.

The worst is cheap plastic. This doesn't clean off very well and they tend to develop a stale, almost dishwater-like aroma after a few washes in hot water. It's the plastic smell of clean (unused) disposable diapers, or band-aids. Highly distracting for cuppers.

In the lab I cup in most often, we use large plastic cups. It's a high-grade plastic that doesn't melt or pick up odors. The cups are large and sturdy, unlikely to tip over, but still narrow enough to hold comfortably. As an added bonus, we have several colors of cup, so that people are less likely to get their cups confused when they set them down for whatever reason.

Any time I cup, especially in new situations, as soon as I get my spit cup in hand, I stick my nose into the clean, empty cup and take a deep whiff. If there's any lingering odor there, I want to notice it right away and get accustomed to it, so that I'm less distracted by it during the cupping.

Of course, it's much better when I take that inhale and find that there's no odor at all! Then I can concentrate all my powers of olfaction where they belong: on the coffee.

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

I have set up hundreds of cuppings in over fifty different venues (I lost count somewhere), in ten different countries, from New York City to to mountains of Harar, Ethiopia. There have been cuppings in fancy restaurants, inside of tents, in world class laboratories, and hooked up to a car battery. Every situation is different and probably none is ideal. But there are certain recurring themes.

A friend recently asked me to write up a list for putting together his cupping lab. I wrote my "dream list", in which money and scarcity was no object. It was kind of fun, actually.

Rather than go through an entire list here on this blog, I am going to share with you a few of the most common problems that I've encountered in my career. These are the problems that pop up again and again. Even when you warn people to prepare for the problem, they often underestimate the problem.

These are concerns for you to address whether you are setting up a one-time cupping on the road, or whether you are building out or improving your own permanent lab.

Cupping Mistake #1: NOT ENOUGH HOT WATER!

Far and away the biggest problem I've run across is not enough hot water. There are only two ingredients that go into a cupping bowl: coffee and hot water. No one ever seems to forget the coffee. Remarkable how often the hot water gets neglected.

Not totally neglected, of course. People bring stoves and electric kettles. But they underestimate how much water they are going to need.

Gas stoves can be remarkably slow, especially if you are heating extra large kettles. If you do more than one table in a row, be prepared to have a longer-than-desired delay between sets. I actually prefer using gas stoves and nice, metal kettles like the one in the picture here. Another potential problem with them is that they don't often have a stated capacity written on them. Put some cold water in the kettle and get out one of your cupping bowls, and see how many times you can fill up the bowl with one kettle. Even though the water will expand a bit when it's hot and even though there will also of course be coffee in the cups when you "go live," this exercise gives you a good rough idea of how much water you can heat at one time. Multiply your result by the number of kettles you have, and you know how many cups you can do at once.

One other snake in the grass with gas stoves is a weak gas-supply. At the Ethiopia Cupping Caravan in Portland this year, we had an amazingly well-oiled machine going among our volunteers, especially considering how little time we were given to prepare and the fact we were doing it outdoors in a park, in muddy-rainy Portland, no less. One minor issue, however, was that when we got all six burners going on our Coleman gas stoves, the little gas canisters actually couldn't supply enough gas pressure for the flames to go full-on. We were left to go six weak flames or three-to-four strong ones (we chose the latter).

Just try and think of all these things ahead of time. The most important thing is not to be surprised.

Electric kettles like this one (disclaimer: I own several and used to do events for Bodum) are popular. Those kettles are great because they heat water quite fast, in about five minutes. However, if you are going to do a large cupping, you will need several. With standard 7.5 ounce cupping bowls, each kettle like this will heat enough water for about seven or eight bowls.

Let's do the math... suppose ten coffee samples, at five cups each, that's fifty cups. So we will need at least seven kettles-worth of water! That's a lot of kettles, and it leads to another problem (hey, I did say this was the most common issue, right?). Kettles like that use a lot of energy, 1500 watts. Many standard electrical circuits can only handle two of these babies at a time before kicking the circuit-breaker and shutting off the power.

Boom, there go the lights. Or, worse, the kettles are the only items on that particular circuit, so when it blows, you don't notice until it's too late. Yes, this has happened to me before. Rather frustrating to get everything ready to go, and walk over and find four kettles of cold water.

Finally, don't forget you will need lots of water for cleaning-cups (you know, for dipping your spoons into) and should generally have plenty of left over hot water for unforeseen problems (spilled samples that need to be re-cupped, etc). Calculate the total amount of water you need for the cups, then increase it by 50%. Now, do you have the capacity to heat that much water at one time, and how long will it take?

One little thing to watch out for: If you are the person running the cupping, you may have some eager assistants running around with hot water kettles. Usually things are tight on hot water and often the helpers start to fill the cleaning-cups before all the coffee has been finished. I always tell them to make absolutely sure that they get to all the coffee samples with the hottest water possible before worrying about the dipping water. You can use room-temperature water to clean your spoon in a pinch (hate doing that, but it's possible). What you cannot do is use room-temperature water to brew the coffee!

That leads us to....

How hot should the water be?

All the boys and girls know the number-answer here, I'm sure. Around 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 94 - 95 degrees Celsius.

The open secret in cupping, of course, is that really, truly, not all of the samples will get exactly the same temperature of water. The first sample you hit from a particular kettle will get hotter water than will the last sample off the same kettle. It's not a big deal because at the grind-setting and extraction time we use for cupping, a few degrees is not going to make a big difference.

But for this reason, I always err on the side of hot. Essentially, taking water right off the boil is the best way to go for most set-ups, especially in larger cuppings (and also, especially, if you are at high altitude). By the time you walk over to the cups, hit the timers, and begin pouring, it will have cooled some. And the water loses heat in the air as it flows from kettle to cup.

Never, never, never fudge things and go with water thats "almost ready!" I've seen this more times than I can count. There's a minor shortage of hot water, and someone is standing over the last kettle as it heats up, feeling impatient and nervous. He grabs the kettle before it's really done and pours it onto the last few samples. This is terrible; it's worse than not doing those samples at all. Now the cuppers will give skewed evaluations of that coffee — which is worse than if they had not given evaluations at all. Resist the temptation! Only use water that's fully at temperature.

Or better yet: Know about all these pitfalls and limitations ahead of time, plan for them, and pull off seamless cuppings that impress your friends and make the coffees shine!

I'll have a few more common cupping mistakes to write about here soon.

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Hot Water!

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Smelly Cups

In this series: Common Cupping Mistakes — Not Really Blind

Backstreet Boys in the Philippines

Cute kids; Backstreet Boys; Coffee stall in the Baguio Market; Arabica growing under cover of chayote vines; Rainstorms; Flooded river; Wild coffee plantation; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; More cute kids.

Photos from Bukidnon, Philippines

Thanks to my friend Zee Zamorah Perez for sharing these beautiful pictures of Bukidnon province on our trip to the village of Miarayon. This trip was in late May of this year; I spent a month in the Philippines and got to visit Bukidnon towards the end of the month.

Miarayon is on the lands of indigenous people there, on the southern island of Mindanao. We had such a lovely trip. There was even a double-rainbow.

Yes, those are coffee trees overhead, and coffee wildlings underfoot.