Hi there. Today, we're going to talk about how to set up a coffee cupping at home.
Now, a coffee cupping is a specific sort of coffee tasting used really commonly in the coffee industry at all sections of the value chain.
It really refers to a specific way of brewing, as well as tasting, and we're not going to try and replicate all of it,
we're going to cherry-pick the best bits so that we can put on a really simple cupping
and do comparative tasting, and that's really the key. The key to developing your sense of taste
is to taste different coffees side by side, and this is the easiest way to do that.
The coffee industry uses cupping in a host of different ways:
a buyer will cup coffees at origin when looking for different lots that they might want to purchase;
an importer may cup coffees to make sure that what arrived matches the pre shipped sample;
a roaster may cup coffees as part of their quality control process to make sure that they're roasting has been up to scratch, and;
a cafe may cup coffees to decide which coffees they want to put on their menu.
Now as I said, there are a ton of protocols and rituals around a cupping in the industry,
we don't need to replicate all of those; we're gonna take the most important bits to get to a nice comparative cupping.
So in this video, I'll walk you through what you need in terms of equipment (and I think you'll have most of it at home already).
I'll walk you through the brewing process, how we're gonna brew coffee in a cupping.
And then I'll walk you through the basic steps of how to cup several coffees side-by-side.
This is going to be a two-part video;
this is really the practicalities of setting up a coffee tasting at home, what you need and how to do it.
The second part is going to be about taste itself: acidity; sweetness; exploring those things, diving in in much more detail.
But this one? This part is just the practicalities of getting set up.
So, the first thing you're going to need is a kettle.
Doesn't matter whether it's a expensive kettle, cheap kettle; it doesn't have to be a gooseneck kettle,
just a regular domestic kettle is completely fine.
Make sure you fill this with fresh cold water, that's nice and soft, and is good tasting. That's important too.
Next thing you're gonna need is a weighing scale and you want to be weighing both coffee and water with it,
so something accurate to .1 of a gram is ideal. And then you're gonna need a coffee grinder. now in an ideal world
You want a grinder this design to grind through everything that you put in it, that doesn't really retain any coffee.
If you have a grinder that does retain coffee and you've got a hand grinder, in this situation a hand grinder might be better.
And then you need some sort of spoons.
Now, it can be something like a coffee cupping spoon. These are designed for coffee cupping
but that's not actually that necessary. It's perfectly good to just use a dessert spoon or a soup spoon.
And if you want to... you could use something really fancy, but that's not a requirement,
you just need something of this kind of size and you need a few of them. And then. we need something to brew in.
Now the industry uses these, they're called cupping bowls. It's nothing special. It's nothing fancy. It's basically a sugar bowl.
It's a bowl of about 250ml in volume, and that's it. You don't need to use something like this,
but if you've got a bunch of these or something like it, then that's great.
But you can use a heatproof glass if you want to; lots of people like to use that. But if you have neither of those things,
then you can brew in just a regular mug.
That's fine, and it can even be a pretty big mug,
but you'll have to make some changes and adapt your recipe a little bit as you go.
But all you need is ideally five or six of roughly the same size things and to know how big they are.
And then the last thing you need...
...is some coffee. Now, I have to be clear here,
what you don't have to do is this; you don't have to go and buy three full bags,
four, five, six, full bags of different coffees. You can get away with getting hold of say,
20 grams of one particular coffee and that's enough for you to cup with it.
Now, the ideal number, I would say if you're starting out, is maybe four or five.
I wouldn't try and get a hold of ten different samples if you're just getting used to kind of cupping coffee side-by-side.
Three is enough, two is enough, actually, to have some interesting learning, but I think four or five is really the best.
Just do what you need to do to get four or five little samples of coffee to taste.
Go and talk to your local coffee shop.
A lot of them are pretty interested in talking to you if you're enthusiastic about tasting coffee,
and you only want a few grams to do it with. If you've got friends that buy a good coffee, trade with them!
There's loads of different ways to do it, but all you need is a little bit of a few different things. That's really the key.
So let's talk about how you're gonna brew coffee for your coffee cupping. And if you've seen my french press technique video,
a lot of this is going to be very, very, very familiar.
Now there's two ideas behind the way that we brew coffee in a cupping.
One, it's the way to brew coffee that has the least human interaction, right?
What we don't want to do is brew coffee in a way where our technique can impact taste.
Pour-overs are great, but how you brew a pour-over can make it sweeter or more acidic,
so at what point are you tasting the pour over, and at what point are you tasting the coffee?
The other big idea behind this whole thing is scalability; to brew five pour-overs would not only be time consuming,
it would be really annoying, let alone trying to do 10 or 20.
This is a way that we can brew several coffees at the same time, and its really, really, really easy.
So, what's the method? Well, it couldn't be simpler. We're going to grind some coffee,
kind of in the finer end of medium fine, and we're gonna pour some hot water on it
and let it steep for about four minutes, just like a French press.
Then, there'll be a crust that forms on the top and we'll stir it after four minutes,
clean off anything that's left floating, and then we have a bowl of coffee,
or a mug of coffee, or a glass of coffee, ready to taste.
So the key things here are recipe and ratio. Now, I'm going to recommend a ratio of 60 grams per liter.
Now, usually for an infusion brew like this, I would recommend 75 grams a liter,
but here, brewing a little weaker actually makes the tasting process a little bit easier.
And then you got recipe, right? So if you've got, say, a 240-250ml bowl, you don't want to use 240-250ml of water.
You want to use 200 and that would be 12 grams of coffee
And when you brew that 12 grams of coffee, it'll bloom; a foam will appear and it will swell up in size.
What that volume is typically three times to four times the weight of the coffee,
and it will vary a little bit, so that twelve grams will easily take up 40ml plus two 200 equals a very full bowl in a 240 ml bowl.
If you don't have five or six cups, or bowls, that are the same size and shape, that's okay
You can use a whole bunch of different sizes if you want to. You got two choices,
Either, pick the smallest size, in this case, 10 grams to 160, and do that in all the vessels, or you could scale up and down.
This is pretty much twice the size, so I'd do 20 grams to about 330 grams of water.
Choice is yours, whatever's easier for you. Now when it comes time to weigh beans, weigh them into the vessel
you're gonna be brewing in later. It's just an easy way to keep them organized as you prep up.
I would say you want to be accurate to ideally your target weight give or take .1 of a gram.
So if I want 12 grams in here, it's 11.9 to 12.1 is my kind of window.
Once you grind them, weigh them again, because you might have lost a little bit of coffee to that grinder.
In addition, before you grind your main tasting sample of a particular coffee,
grind through just a little handful of beans just to make sure that there's nothing left from a previous coffee in that grinder.
Once that's done, once you've weighed out all your beans, hide the bags;
what you don't want is kind of prompts or taste notes lying around influencing you when you taste,
so make a note of what's what, get rid of them.
For the sake of this tasting, I'm just gonna set up three different coffees in three very different vessels;
I'm going to need a couple of spare empty vessels that I'll use for rinsing and cleaning;
and I'll be good to go.
So right now, I'm gonna prep my three samples, and then I'm gonna boil a kettle, and when I come back,
we'll start the tasting process.
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Our water is boiled and we are ready to go.
Now, if you go to an industry tasting, you'll notice that people are often already taking notes
on things like the smell of the dry grounds.
There are going to be opportunities to smell the coffee before we taste it and that's interesting,
but if you're new to coffee tasting: this isn't a test; if it's fun, that's good;
if it's interesting, that's good; but you don't have to take copious notes,
you don't have to find dozens of words to describe things; don't worry about it. Let's get into brewing.
Now, I'm going to brew on scales because I'm brewing three different recipes here,
I've got 12 grams, 15 and 20 (and I'll need to brew the right weights accordingly) and it's really hard
to brew consistently without scales, even in the same bowls, with the same weight of coffee.
Some coffees bloom more than others. So zero it out, add your hot water...
Lovely. These are a little bit... hot.
And this is now the perfect time to use the mostly useless digital assistant in your pocket, in your phone; set a timer for four minutes
Okay, your timer is set for four minutes.
At the end of four minutes, we're gonna get a spoon and we're gonna use it to stop the brewing process.
We're gonna gently stir the crust on top three times, and that's gonna cause most of the grounds to sink to the bottom.
You're then getting at a second spoon to scrape off anything on the top that's still floating,
leaving a clean bowl ready to taste. Now again in the industry,
you'll notice people smelling really intently when they're stirring that crust.
It's an interesting aroma release moment. But if you're new to coffee tasting, don't worry about it too much.
It's fun, and it's interesting, but don't obsess over these kind of details.
The coffee industry has a bunch of other priorities around a tasting than we do at home.
So now these are nearly ready to taste, they're just a little bit too hot.
I would recommend waiting at least 10 more minutes to let them cool down.
Right now, they're not only so hot that they'd burn your tongue,
but they're almost impossible to taste when they're that hot.
Tasting gets easier the cooler a coffee gets.
Use this time to get rid of that rinse water, clean up the space, and get ready to cup.
Go and grab that notebook,
drink a glass of water, and get ready.
And so now finally, it's time to taste.
So, the spoon. The spoon is there so that we can just have a little sample of coffee
and not have to pick up a mug of hot liquid. That's it.
It lets us do one more thing, which is slurp the coffee.
Now, you'll see coffee professionals make an astonishing array of bizarre noises as they slurp.
This is mostly to cover our insecurities and make us look like we know what we're doing.
Really, you need a little sample of liquid and just gently...
You're really just trying to gently spray the coffee into your mouth.
It's... just kind of turning up the volume on the flavors that you're tasting.
Give your spoon a little rinse between bowls,
and keep tasting.
Compare and contrast; that's the game here.
Make sure you keep tasting from hot, all the way down to kind of room temperature;
the coffees are gonna change so much in that time and they'll just get easier and easier to taste.
So like I said in a couple of weeks,
there'll be another part of this which is much more focused on exploring your sense of taste through coffee.
This is really just about the practical process of setting up and doing a coffee cupping at home,
And what I want you to do is to go and try doing this.
Set something up, give it a go. Taste, compare, contrast.
Don't overthink it. Just think about what you'd like, what you don't like.
When you're familiar with the process, then we'll go deeper on your sense of taste and developing your palate for coffee.
I'd love your feedback down in the comments below. Did you try this?
Have you run a cupping at home? Did you come up with some problems? Did you have a good time?
Did you enjoy it? Was it fun? Was it easy? Let me know your thoughts, I want to hear.
As always, thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day!