Our Approach to Quality Cupping

OK, after consulting the internet I have come to the conclusion that too much information can be hazardous to your cupping health. Meaning, that the more technical and scientific the light you shed on a subject, the more difficult one can make a relatively easy process. For reasons both good and true, science has dissected and broken down coffee cupping to a seemingly endless outline chart (like a family tree) of nuances and causes, and while impressive on paper, digital monitors and colourful posters it can serve to intimidate and possibly frighten a newbie developing coffee taster.
Although I can speak and understand near fluent coffee science geek (It’s kind of like speaking Vulcan), and understand things like endothermic and pyrolysis developing processes and the Maillard reaction browning process, it actually helps me to focus on tasting task at hand if I blank the slate out of these elements and go to my happy tasting place which consists of things I understand more than science... things like stereo systems, symphonies, car radios, and my memories of being a kid who grew up in the woods of New England and had my share of mouthfuls of nature.
Coffee, to me is supposed to be consumed and enjoyed. I would rather sit by a window and drink a great cup of coffee peacefully and happily, enjoying its nuances with simple thoughts such as “this is really good”, or “man, the berry notes in this are great” rather than having thoughts like “this coffee was developed too fast in the endothermic stage and therefore I am tasting too much underdevelopment of proteins and sour acids”. It makes it far less romantic and intimate an experience.
So what does going to a musically active mindset do for me while cupping? It provides simple imagery. I like to think of coffees as being symphonies with the body being the bass and the acids being the high strings. Nuances can fill the range in between as the rest of the instrumentation, and harmony can resonate throughout my entire palette! –Or not....
The beauty and challenge in musical cupping is being able to appreciate simple things. Can a body on a coffee be enjoyable if that’s really all that the coffee offers? Sure! It’s a bass solo by a great bass player! Can a duet between a bass player and a lone violinist sound harmonious and complete without any other instruments? Sure! Can it fall apart if the strings on that violin are out of tune or the bass player has only been playing for a week? Sure! You get all these ranges of harmony and possibilities of beauty when things like body, sweetness, and acids play well together. Can an orchestra start off strong, lovely and elegant then fall apart suddenly as a flutist falls out of her chair? Of course! Balance and harmony are delicate things and it takes a solid core to keep it together. The same goes for coffee nuances. They can be very simple or they can be very complex, sometimes even both at once, but this method is a mere simple tool to help me (personally) think of the flavors and characteristics of coffee in a light that is a bit different than what the books, websites, and user manuals teach you and makes it unique to one’s self. I might not and probably will not speak of the coffee verbally this way when it comes time for discussion, but it helps me to silently construct my opinions on the offerings of that particular sample while it’s on the table. It’s a framework that helps me investigate and balance out the nuances which is comprised of a simple relatable method which works personally for me. The bottom line is to keep it as simple as you can, and break it down into bite sized pieces. There is no absolute right or wrong with flavor perception. It’s as unique as the individual who is evaluating the sample. Have fun with it and make it your own!

Acidity – This one is often a confusing, misconstrued, highly personally opinionated category. In my head, I sometimes wish there was a double tiered sliding scale for scoring this, one for intensity and another for quality of that intensity. I HATE having to decide numerically what acidity should get for a score merely by the pure presence of it. If the acidity is massively intense, acrid and un-enjoyable as if one were chewing on a battery, do I have to give it a high score for acidity? If I don’t and give it a low score, the first response I might get from people reading a cup report might be “this acidity and huge, distracting, and ultra sour! Why the ^%$& did you only give it a 4 for acidity?!?” So with that said, what should a battery like, intensely sour and uber acrid acidity get for a score? There isn’t, without words, much room to negotiate this.
To me, acidity can be both pleasantly present if kept in check or pleasantly un-present if the body has enough going on to make you not miss the energy of high sparklees. It can seem carbonated or it can seem subdued. It can be subtle or it can be completely enjoyably missing. It greatly depends on what else the bigger nuance picture reveals for coloration. If I’m looking for a coffee from Brazil, for example, that needs to have the biggest, most leather coated body imaginable with little to no acidity in it as a base for my espresso blend, and I find one that I love, what do I score the acidity on a cup report? 5? 7? 8? The reason I love this coffee so much is for the giant body and severe invisibility of the acids... but it has to receive a numeric score, so......
Pleasant acidities come in many shapes, sizes, forms, and volumes. They can be quite fruity and citric, like an orange, grapefruit or lemon, or they can be incredibly sweet and shaped of sugar like a red delicious apple or an ice cold can of Coca Cola. Both are intense and dominant, but the citric side tends to be tangy and tart and the refined sugar side tends to be laser accurate and razor sharp. Both are quite intense and potentially refreshing, but are made of completely different acids. Red wine, white wine, vinegar, crisp, tart, intense, sour, acrid, astringent, sharp, clean, fruity, unbearable, distracting, stabbing, slicing, delicate, pinched – all of these are relatively common descriptors of coffee acidity, and run the full gamut of differences in association with each other.  As above mentioned, there should almost be two acidity tiers to evaluate, intensity and quality of nuance with an extra point box just in case the scoring is a bit off. For example.
Proposed here is a new acidity scale, where on the left we have what is currently in place, and at the right is the new version (this would work for classifying the body as well). The proposed acid evaluated here was vinegar. This goes to explain that vinegar would undoubtedly get a high marking, a full 5 for intensity, but since it is an undesirable nuance, the quality of evaluation gets one point  and results in a total score of 6, which to me sounds about right. The version on the left merely tells you the acid level is high, but does NOT tell you whether the acidity is good or bad. Just that it is high.

Body – From the internet: “Body is the feeling that the coffee has in your mouth. It is the viscosity, heaviness, thickness, or richness that is perceived on the tongue. A good example of body would be that of the feeling of whole milk in your mouth, as compared to water. Your perception of the body of a coffee is related to the oils and solids extracted during brewing.”
That sums it up pretty well for me, but there is a lot more room to expand on this. Body should have a direct relationship with the other characteristics of the cup, but also not be afraid to back off in needed to let other soloists take the stage if they possess more skill and beauty. Poetic and unnecessary an explanation, I know, but what I’m trying to say is that even coffees with the least amount of body can still be great if some other characteristic (acidity or sweetness or whatever else) is delightful and perhaps seductive enough to warrant praise. If I come across a coffee from say, Mexico, and that coffee has the lightest of light bodies with just a hint of citrus and black tea, I’ll probably adore it for its refreshment nature, like water served with lemon at a street side cafe, or a nice refreshing summer beer that you can drink 20 of (not recommended) on your back porch. It might be thin and seemingly dilute, but that’s exactly what makes that coffee work. It’s to be evaluated by itself as well as part of the whole.
On the other side of the coin, coffees can be equipped with bodies that are so thick and dense that one can seem to float a quarter on top of it without sinking. Bodies like this can work either for or against that coffee. I’ve had coffees in the past that were all body and pretty much nothing else and the only flavor note in that coffee was chocolate. I seriously wanted to let this coffee cool so I could chug it as chocolate milk. I loved it for that reason. It was thick, creamy, massive, and delicious. I would score it a 10 if the body scoring section was evaluated only on amount of body. Then I realized that there would be no distinction or praise for this score of 10 if I drank a coffee that resembled a glass of pond water and mud, which would probably also get a 10 if the scale were judged solely by presence of body. What exactly should get evaluated to arrive at a score for body?? Back to the two tier scoring system!! Here is a proposed version using the above mentioned Mexico as an example. (The one with very little body, but was refreshing as a swimming pool on a hot day)


The score on the left would honest tell me to probably expect a big, full body as an 8 is a great score, but for this particular example, I would probably be mislead. The score on the right, also an 8, tells me that the coffee had a very light body, but the balance of that body getting full marks leads me to expect that there is a balanced intimacy in this coffee that the body and acidity support as a whole. It assures me that the light body is not at all lacking, but is actually appropriate and harmonious with the rest of the cups offerings.