My First Post! (The Score on Cupping Coffee)
(This [my first blog post] seemed like as good, and important, a topic to embark with as any…the symbolism of the 4th of July might be addressed later…independence from dithering over which topic to start with, perhaps? Or maybe it’s just in the celebratory mood of the day and the inspirational moment of reading some good writing earlier in the day.)
The Score on Cupping Coffee
The practice of cupping coffee, or, to be more specific, the evaluation of a particular coffee for commercial purposes, has evolved a lot over the years.
It started out, in 1905, as a repeatable regimen, developed by the Folger’s Coffee Company in San Francisco, as a way of objectively evaluating whether a coffee was of sufficiently good quality to approve and purchase. Of course, while screening for defects, cuppers would also consider whether the coffee was suitable for a particular blend or characteristic enough of a particular origin to be sold as a “straight” Colombian or Javanese (to use two examples) coffee.
While I have strongly advocated that we get out of the pass/fail modality of cupping coffee and away from the “That’ll work,” and “Nope, not that one,” spectrum of decision making that was more in vogue when I got into the business over 30 years ago, it has to be noted that somehow, despite their terseness, the cuppers that I first met early on in my career, sure knew a hell a lot about coffee and why it would taste one way versus another and what was wrong with it, AND what MIGHT go wrong with it, and how it could be used. HOW they got this knowledge was and is a mystery to me, they sure didn’t talk a lot, unless pushed, at least not about coffee; they hardly ever went to origin; and they never described what they tasted, except in maybe one or two words (two words only if they were to go on and on about it). They certainly didn’t assign SCORES to the coffees they tasted.
Today, most of the folks I know in the coffee business rate their coffees on some sort of scale that might be one to ten or, more typically, 50-100. Along with the scores they usually associate several descriptors to each step in the cupping process, from breaking the crust to the final “finish” or aftertaste. I believe this is basically a good thing, it has helped differentiate coffees better and distinguish coffees from those that are just good to the ones that are truly exceptional. The process also helps all of us in the industry market/sell higher-end coffees to coffee drinkers in a way that is familiar and unintimidating, thanks to the scores that ice-skaters, dancers and more recently, wines, beers and hard liquors get from various writers, state fair judges and self-appointed commercially established ventures that are in the business of rating things and giving them scores. Even the incorruptible Consumer Reports Magazine now scores coffees (with some misplaced over-confidence, I might add…). It was inevitable that the taste of a particular coffee (at a particular time) would become a number.
And so, obviously, there are drawbacks. With every step forward we lose some ground in another direction, (sometimes on an axis that we don’t even realize is in play). Yes, its great that we can now sell coffee on the same footing with wine sellers, but we lose something too, and so does the coffee drinker. With the debut of the numbered score we gain certainty and comfort but we lose the even more certain understanding that there is still yet more to learn about that particular coffee and the place where it came from and the people that grew it. If it’s an “87” for example, that means it’s pretty darn good, and a lot of high end specialty roasters might sell it in a blend or as a generic single origin coffee, but hardly ever would it reach the vaunted status of a “micro-lot” and be touted as exceptional, sold for twice the price of most coffees being sold today and feature a picture of the farmer (and maybe his family) on the label and the roaster’s web site page.
Now, this is still an improvement, and I’m not complaining (well not completely) but the problem is that another day, in a slightly different circumstance, with a slightly different roast, that coffee might score an “89” and be set aside for consideration as a microlot, or only rate and “85” and be shoved off the cupping table and into the garden compost.
And, yes, to repeat: the coffee drinkers lose out as well. Because by reading from some independent source that one coffee is rated an 89 and another a 93 and then paying up for the “93” of settling for the “89” they lose much of what should be their sense of what those two coffees taste like are really worth, to THEM. When they do taste the coffees, many coffee drinkers (and I see this happen with wine drinkers as well) evaluate themselves versus the score rather than (and, obviously, I recommend this second approach) stop and wonder if the score itself is correct and why it was given and under what circumstances and finally, whether they agree that the coffee does, relatively, merit the score it’s labeled with.
Coffee, in my experience, is one of the most damned ephemeral and fickle of the gustatory commodities that it’s our pleasure as human beings to taste and consider. From the time the seed of the tree germinates, from the weather at every step of tree’s maturation, from the vagaries of the soils that it encounters in the nursery and in the field, from the nutrients that are present already, and added or not added to the soil, from the picking to processing, to storage and transport, to roasting and packaging and then to brewing: it is freaking mind-boggling how many factors can lead one cup of coffee to taste completely different from another. To reduce it all to a since two digit score is, really, literally, stupefying; yet, necessary and beneficial. Oh well!
When I cup and, yes, score coffees in my business, for myself and to review with my suppliers and customers, I try really hard to keep this all in mind. That one score I come up with, that one particular time, isn’t “the” score, it’s maybe a pixel or two in the whole picture that I need to try and put together about that coffee. I have to remember where the coffee came from, the time of year it is, how fresh (or not) the coffee is, when it was processed and roasted, and what it is being used for.
I often put question marks after my scores, not because I’m a woosy wimp that can’t make a decision (a separate discussion there, please…) but because I want to remind myself (among other things) that I am cupping what is often the entirety of a family’s total income for a year and that I better be damned humble and terribly careful in deciding what I think of that coffee.
Getting back to the pixel model and looking at it more arithmetically, I try never to think of my score as “the” score, but part of the data set that will help establish a score, the best sense of how good a particular coffee tastes this time around (that could mean a whole crop for the year, or one particular lot from a particular crop). I’ll try to ask my customers what they think, I will ask my colleagues in my office and my trading partners, I’ll ask the exporter and/or the farmer if he or she has cupped the coffee.
Ideally.
Yes, ideally, because it is also the case that there often just isn’t the time and resources to go through all that legwork and still make a living — and you have to rely on that one little data point, that one pixel; and make a decision based on that. I hope that my experience and intuition help me out; I hope I’m lucky more often than not.
And I pray to my agnostic’s God that I don’t forget that’s all I’m doing: making my best guess. No one, certainly not me, can “know” what a coffee is worth by giving it an “83” instead of an “88” or what a farmer should be paid for it based on one tasting, a few slurps of the spoon and a slight spin of the cupping table on to the next coffee. We can only do our best and guess, and hope we get better at it and hope that everyone we’re working with, from the farmer to, yes, the coffee drinker, is working as hard. Because, oh yeah, not only is that farmer’s fortune based on our collective “best guesses,” but mine is too.
Postscript: I’ve been thinking about this “first post” for some time, but it was brought to realization by an experience I had this weekend: cupping a refined version of a coffee that had been sampled to me once before. Although it was poorly prepared, I thought the raw material was promising and I asked for a more carefully selected sample. Cupping that sample last night was disappointing but when I made a cup of the same roast this morning it was delicious. but what do I know? I’ve only been doing this for thirty years…you live, and you learn, with any luck.
