An Intro To Coffee Tasting - The Basics Of Our Coffee Cupping Process

i hope you guys are all doing quite well uh today i'm pretty excited to be kicking off this video because this has got to be one of my all-time favorite things to do in coffee which is to simply drink coffee it's to taste coffee it's to absolutely cover my taste buds with the flavor of coffee with the nuances and the complexities of coffee and the good and the bad the moldy and the spectacular we're talking about cupping coffees which is in other words another way of saying it's we're tasting coffees [Music] the specialty coffee association has simply just created this so that we can all have a common way of tasting coffees for those of you guys who are wondering like why do we have to have a specific procedure and process when we're tasting coffees can't we just make a drip coffee of it can we just make an espresso shot and to a certain extent i can say yeah you can actually simply just go and brew a specific coffee and know what it tastes like but when you're brewing coffee there's a lot of all kinds of variables involved water temperature the kind of water you're using the grind size the the brew method different brew methods are going to pull out different characteristics and qualities of coffee and that's the beautiful thing about cupping coffees it takes away a lot of the complex variables that you can get into brewing and simply strips it down to pouring water over grounds and extracting the flavor of the coffee the characteristics of the coffee you'll need uh either a cupping bowl or some kind of small bowl you don't want anything too big but you also don't want anything too small but the size of kind of like a cappuccino like an eight ounce bowl that leads me to saying you're probably gonna need if you're cupping one coffee two bowls for each coffee and we have one bowl that we use as pretty much a rinser so after you taste the coffee out of the bowl you go ahead and put your spoon into the bowl of hot water this just holds hot water to sanitize this spoon which i absolutely love the spoon and that gets me to the second thing you can use any spoon a teaspoon a tablespoon anything that just has has some kind of bold shape to it so that you can actually get something it's a little bit of a flatter spoon it's gonna be a little more difficult to uh to scoop up some some coffee into your spoon to slurp you're also going to need some coffee i have some freshly ground coffee in here yeah you're going to want to ground it grind it not too fine and not too coarse probably like a medium medium coarseness if you're familiar with doing pour overs you can just do a pour over grind i think that's gonna do well until you tailor it to kind of your preference and your taste but whatever you go with something that we've done is we found our golden spot of grinding size and we just keep doing that every single time and we just don't dare to adjust it because it's going to change our results and we kind of want to keep things as consistent as possible i'm gonna go ahead and hit this to start and we can actually jump right into our cupping and kind of talk through the basics of cupping coffee let's do this it sounds like a freaking rocket ship out there just boiling some some tasty water so while we're waiting for the water to finish boiling um i'm gonna go ahead and put some coffee into these bowls so i'm gonna use a scale this helps us kind of keep our cuppings consistent from one cupping to another and we're dosing out about 12 grams of coffee per cupping and this is a part of the cupping that you can go ahead and give your coffee a smell give it's called these are called dry smells so get it all in there get all this all the tasty all the juicy smells in there the good thing about these bowls is that they're all kind of the same size so when we put 12 grams of coffee in here we just fill them up to the very brim before you go on you're gonna go ahead and grab your phone or grab a timer and you wanna time your cuppings start the timer as soon as the water hits the the coffee grounds so let's do this [Music] so i'm looking at about 230 grams of water to 12 grams of coffee make sure you get all the grounds you might see some clumping of grounds in the bowl you want to get them all saturated all of them it's also recommended to do like a 1 to 18 so if you're somewhere in the ballpark right there it's gonna do quite fine for your cupping so pretty and so we're looking at our timer we're approaching about four minutes so here what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna break the crust that has stacked up at the top brim that's just a bunch of grounds that are floating at the top you have to get your nose right up in there because as soon as you break there's going to be some delicious tasty aromas that you want to be able to catch to further evaluate your cup before we do that though we'll go ahead and take this empty bowl and fill it with some water so that it's ready to be used to sanitize the spoon that you're using to break the crust so let's get right into this [Music] after you take in those aromas put that spoon right back in there what you'll notice is there's a thin layer of light brown foam or like lighter grounds that are floating at the top still you're gonna want to take those off because in a couple minutes here we're gonna go ahead and start sipping and tasting the coffee and you don't want those grounds in your mouth on your palette because it just it's not going to be fun who wants who who wants grounds in their i mean if you do leave them go ahead and leave them on there if you do that's that is totally fine but i don't all right so now we're just gonna go ahead and wait until about the 10 11 minute mark that's about when the coffee starts to cool down and uh is actually drinkable if it's too hot it's not gonna be a very pleasing experience you're gonna burn your tongue burn your mouth burn something in there that you don't actually want to be burning [Music] so we're coming up at about a little past 10 minutes go ahead and dip your spoon right back into your hot water bowl and all you're going to want to do is get scoop up a little bit of coffee in your spoon and give it a sip if you really want to go out of the way go ahead and give it a good slurp that sprays the coffee all over your palate and gives some air circulation in your mouth so you can actually maybe hopefully it'll help you pick up some things that are in the coffee so let's get right into it so as time progresses on your timer uh you're going to notice that some of these coffees are changing flavor are there's more intriguing things coming out out of the flavor profile the characteristics and as it cools your coffee is going to be changing quite drastically so go ahead and just keep keep coming back to the same bowls um and giving them some slurping some tasty [Music] so that's kind of all there is to tasting coffees cupping coffees there's a little bit more of the complex side which will actually make a different video for cupping coffees that's more a little bit more in-depth a little bit more complex well thank you guys so much for joining me on this cupping hopefully this was insightful hopefully this was helpful in in in some way if you guys have any questions feel free to comment below the comment section below is to for us to have a conversation i want to answer some questions maybe we can share some of our experiences and hope you guys have a wonderful spectacular day we'll see you guys in the next one see ya you

Channel: Mirror Coffee Roasters

Views: 1,421

Keywords: coffee tasting, cupping coffee, guide to coffee tasting, cupping, specialty coffee, coffee flavors, coffee tasting notes, coffee taste test, tasting coffee, how to taste coffee, basics of cupping coffee, tasting, bellingham

Id: KMqMADgDbFM

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020