The Sulotco has had 24 hours to rest now, so time to do a bit of cupping.
It’s easy to worry too much about doing cupping “properly”. At its heart, cupping offers a method of preparing and trying coffee that allows someone to explore the flavours and components of a particular bean as fully as possible. Cupping is about maximalism in coffee exploration.
There are ways to do it that have evolved – largely because there are situations when you want to have a consistent method. If you are trying 10 coffees that are about to go through an auction, you want to have a like-with-like approach so that you can decide what to buy. If you are judging competition coffee, you need a like-for-like approach. But it’s really about enjoying coffee, so if technique gets in the way — just do it!
Word of warning: Try and get some good coffee for this. You won’t taste what isn’t there. If you’ve never tried a really, really good Kenyan, now is the time to try. A lot of people have no idea that there is anything interesting to taste in a cup of coffee precisely because all the coffee they’ve ever drunk never had anything interesting to taste in it!
Here’s the idea.
- Get out the coffee you want to try. Preferably more than one. Pros always roast very lightly for cupping, as a darker roast will hide the tastes of the individual bean. I’ve broken that rule – all mine are roasted into 2nd crack because I want to try them as the espresso I would eventually drink as well.
- Grind 18g of beans to a coarse grind – slightly coarser than for a cafetiere. Smell the dry grounds. Fresh /stale? Nutty / Sweet / Spicy?
- Place in a round-bottomed cup or small bowl (roughly 7-8 oz in size). (If you really want you could buy some cupping bowls!) Pour on water just below boiling.
- Leave for 3-4 minutes.
- Break the crust. Using a soup spoon (or special cupping spoon!), stir the contents of the cup 3 times to break the crust of grounds on the surface. As you do this, an intense smell comes off the wet grounds. Take a good sniff. Get in close. What does it smell like? (Hopefully – coffee!, but what else can you say?)
- Most of the ground will have sunk to the bottom of the cup. That’s why you use a coarse grind. But at this point you’ll want to scoop away any that are left on the surface.
- Then get tasting.
- Put some coffee on your spoon, take it to your mouth, and then suck hard. Have a really good slurp! The idea is to coat the whole of the inside of your mouth with the coffee – there are taste-buds all over the inside of the mouth.
- Don’t worry – you won’t burn yourself provided you don’t have half a pint on the spoon. (Legal note: I’m not liable for burnt noses or tongues).
- See how you can describe the taste. Does the coffee remind you of anything else you’ve eaten? How does it feel in the mouth – full-bodied like cream, or thin like skimmed milk? How would you describe the finish – what taste is left in your mouth after it’s gone?
- Don’t worry too much about the right answer. There isn’t one. Just have fun seeing how you can describe the coffee.
- Then move onto the next coffee
- Then (and this is important), go back to the first one again. Keep going round and round the table, because as a coffee cools its taste changes. You’ll notice things after it’s started cooling that weren’t there at all to start with. Conversely, a coffee may have some really bad taints that aren’t apparent when it’s realy hot.
So how did it go. Well: Here’s the cupping table set up:
3 coffees to try. The Sulotco I’ve just roasted. Some Kalosi (the previous Indonesian I used to buy, which I’m trying to improve upon). And some Tesco Finest* Java Beans that someone gave me – also Indonesian. Nice to have 3 to try. I’m not expecting the Tesco to taste as good because it would have been roasted months not days ago, but we’ll see what we find.
| Tesco Finest | Kalosi | Sulotco | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
| Smell of Dry Grounds | Sweet | Sweet, Aromatic, Spicy | Spicy |
| Breaking the crust | Rubber, Aromatic, Clove Oil | Fresh, Aromatic, Pungent | Very Sweet, Fruity |
| Acidity / Liveliness | Totally flat. Lifeless (0/10) | Smooth (8/10) | Winey (8/10) |
| Body | Medium (5/10) | Full-bodied (10/10) | Rich (8/10) |
| Flavour | Bitter. Carbon. Undrinkable! (0/10) | Bitter tones and sweet tones. Aromatic flavours. Malty as it cooled (6/10) | Bit of caramel. BUTTER BUTTER BUTTER. Winey. On cooling developed fruit tones: Grapefruit / Blackcurrant (9/10) |
| Finish | Burnt. Bitter (0/10) | Silky. Bitter (4/10) | Bitter, but less so than the Kalosi. Dry. (8/10) |
| Total score (max 40) | 5 | 28 | 33 |
Conclusions:
I didn’t expect the Tesco to rival freshly roasted beans chosen from many alternatives by a micro-roaster who knows what he’s doing. But I didn’t expect the contrast to be that stark! The wierd thing is that the smell was OK.
The butter and the fruit in the Sulotco was just gorgeous. I’ll be buying more of this – it really can handle a dark roast and still leave some creamy, caramely tastes in the cup. It’s just what I’m after.
Steve – put 2kg back for me – I’ll be ordering some of that just as soon as I’ve decided what else to buy at the same time!
Now it’s over to you…
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