Coffee cupping for the perfect taste

Have you ever wondered how we keep Jericho Coffee Traders' coffee tasting so awesome?

In a word: Cupping!

Cupping is how we decide which coffees make it into the our range. Every coffee you buy from our website has been through it - and there's always quite a few coffees that haven't made the cut!

Our head roaster, Stretch, is constantly sourcing new origins. He tastes dozens of samples at any given time, looking for coffees that fit the flavour profiles we're after: clean, complex, with something worth talking about in the cup.

The ones that pass his cut go to the tasting panel - which is essentially our team gathered around a table with spoons - and only once everyone agrees it's a fit, does a coffee earn its place in our range, whether that's a permanent addition or one of our short-run offerings.

Our obesssion with the roasting and cupping process is one of the reasons why we are the official coffee supplier to world-renowned Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, the double Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel led Raymond Blanc OBE!

So what actually happens during a cupping session?

The setup is more controlled than it might look. Each coffee is ground to the same coarseness, weighed to the same dose, and brewed with water at the same temperature - typically around 93°C. The cups are identical. The steeping time is the same. Even the spoons matter: a proper cupping spoon is deep-bowled and holds just enough coffee to draw a decent slurp. The slurping is deliberate - it aerates the coffee as it hits your palate, spreading it across your taste receptors more effectively than a careful sip would.

Once the coffee has steeped for around four minutes, there's a crust of grounds sitting on the surface. That's broken with the back of the spoon, then comes the nose test! That first rush of aroma as the crust breaks is one of the most useful moments in the whole process. Fruity, earthy, floral, fermented: a lot of information comes through in that few seconds before the coffee cools.

Then you wait. Cupping is assessed across a temperature range, not just at drinking temperature, because the flavour profile of a coffee changes significantly as it cools. Some coffees that taste fine when hot develop an unpleasant astringency as they cool; others open up and reveal complexity you'd completely miss from a single hot sip. We score across the full range.

The SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) cupping protocol breaks assessment into categories: aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, uniformity, and clean cup. A coffee needs an SCA score of 80 or above across these to be classed as speciality.  Every coffee in our range hits that threshold - it's a baseline, not a marketing claim.

Stretch scores each sample individually before the panel scores together. We compare notes, which is usually where it gets interesting. A coffee that reads as "stone fruit" to one taster might be "floral" to another - and both can be right, depending on which compounds are registering most strongly. The panel discussion is how we end up with tasting notes that are useful rather than vague.

How to try cupping at home

You don't need specialist equipment. Two or three coffees, a kitchen scale, a kettle with a thermometer, and some identical cups will get you most of the way there. Grind each coffee to the same setting (medium-fine works for most), use 8.25g per 150ml of water, pour at 93°C, and leave for four minutes before you skim the grounds and start tasting.

Two things that make a real difference: avoid strong food for at least an hour beforehand, and skip the perfume or scented candles in the room. Your sense of smell is doing a lot of the work, and it's easily overridden.

It's a good way to understand what you actually prefer in a cup - and why. Once you've cupped a washed Ethiopian against a natural-process Guatemalan side by side, the difference in how processing affects flavour becomes immediately obvious. More so than any description we could write!

Explore our speciality coffee range - each one has been through exactly this process before it reaches you.