How To Cup (Taste) Coffee At Home
Why Coffee Stack Exchange recommends it
Coffee Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as a clear, practical starting point for home cupping and as a reference for how the cupping process works.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What it is
James Hoffmann walks through how to run a simple coffee cupping at home, covering the equipment, grind, water, timing and the slurping technique used to taste. It is part one of a series, aimed at beginners who want a standardised way to compare coffees without professional gear.
What people said
Recommends fixer1234 · 2022-10 · Coffee Stack Exchange · on “How to do coffee tasting or cupping”
There's a lot of good information online to get started. A great one is this James Hoffmann video: How To Cup (Taste) Coffee At Home [this video] . If you're just starting out, he provides a common-sense explanation and method for basic coffee tasting that strips out a lot of the complexities used in professional or commercial tasting. The gist of cupping is that it uses a simple brewing method that isn't influenced by the person's technique. Standardized conditions ensure that everything is brewed the same, in a way that produces properly-extracted coffee of normal-strength. The brewing method is similar to French press. It adds the tasting method of slurping the coffee from a spoon. That remove
Recommends technical_difficulty · 2023-10 · Coffee Stack Exchange · on “What's best median between grinding coffee beans every day or the whole bag at once so that it stays relatively fresh?”
Don't use pre-ground coffee. I recently switched from buying pre-ground coffee to whole beans That is great! Freshly grinding your coffee is the single biggest improvement you can do to your setup to have better quality coffee. this is time-consuming to do every morning What kind of grinder and how much coffee are you using? Even with my (slow) hand grinder, I don't need more than 30-40 seconds to grind my coffee. Are you brewing a lot of coffee at once? What would be the best median between grinding it every day or the whole bag at once so that the ground coffee still remains relatively fresh? There really is absolutely no middle ground here. Already ground coffee gets stale within minutes
Cites Karim Chahine · 2022-11 · Coffee Stack Exchange · on “Role of "time before crust breaking" in cupping”
One of the instructions for cupping is to wait 4 minutes before breaking the crust and removing floating stuff. It is also said (for instance by James Hoffmann [this video] ) that at that point the brewing process is stopped. This is not clear to me and I have a couple of questions in particular which are all related: Why would the brewing process stop? What is the role of the time spent before breaking? Why 4 minutes? What would happen with much shorter or much longer times? I've tried to cup the same coffee with two different times before breaking (2min vs 8min) and I couldn't notice any difference, so I'm quite puzzled.