Significance of coffee cupping
Gone are those days of streaming lifeless cups of coffee and in their place, now there are fancy cafes around us. To the coffee connoisseurs, the taste of coffee is still an enigma that is yet unresolved. Whenever we are in a cafe or the comfort corner of our home, we are less likely to pause and unearth the mystery of it. Be it sourcing coffee bean or coffee cupping, commoners tend to have less idea regarding this. Coffee cupping mainly stands for testing the taste profile of coffee beans. Plus, you can also consider it as a way of comparing different types of coffee simultaneously.
Have you ever wondered how baristas manage to fill a cup of coffee with different taste profiles? The answer lies in coffee cupping which enables cafes to experiment with different flavours and aromas. Imagine the moment, when despite being most price-sensitive, you never hesitate to spend around six hundred or a thousand bucks just to get the best cup of coffee. The secret of your favourite Starbucks coffee is nothing but the subtle art of coffee cupping. In renowned cafes, usually, the baristas are assigned the duty of cupping in terms of capturing a better market and retaining customers with unique tastes. Usually, coffee cupping can be done several times a year. However, in the cafes, twice a year cupping is done to maintain consistency in the service.
Recognising different tastes in coffee
When it comes to coffee cupping, smell and taste are crucial and they can also be defined as “chemical senses”. The aroma keeps differing from one coffee to another based on the acidic profile and other abstract aspects. Different types of papillae can recognise variations in taste. Let’s have a look at the four major tastes in coffee.
- Filiform papillae-These papillae are mainly accountable for perceiving the salty taste in food and even it can analyse the viscosity of the drink. Believe it or not, as we age we gradually lose this particular taste.
- Fungiform papillae-These papillae are usually located on the front edges of the human tongue and are conducive to identifying the sweet taste. We get to perceive the chocolaty taste of coffee only due to this papillae.
- Circumvallate papillae-No matter how healthy a food is, its bitter-sweet taste never fails to irk us. Circumvallate papillae are something accountable for recognising the bitter taste.
- Foliate Papillae-Last but not the least, foliate papillae are something that enables us to recognise sour flavour and even it makes us alert whether the food is rotten or not.
Qualities of coffee taster
Although your fondness towards a particular taste or aroma of coffee is a subjective element, when it comes to coffee cupping, some of the objective aspects are also given utmost priority. In cafes, the aroma, basic taste, solidity and consistency of the coffee bean are determined and evaluated solely for commercial purposes. Want to unravel the secrets of a coffee taster to understand the properties of coffee beans objectively? Here we have mentioned the qualities that a coffee taster judge must have to evaluate the standard of coffee beans.
- Having a sound sensory memory is a must-have quality for a coffee taster.
- Be it in the customer service industry or the coffee industry, sound communication skill is the cornerstone of success. However, to become a coffee taster, you must have that grip over the communication skill in terms of conveying the aromatic profile of the coffee to the coffee manufacturing firm or the cafes.
- Having the sound ability of numerical evaluation is also required to transform the qualities of a coffee into the numerical calculation.
Have a flair to work in the coffee industry? The prospect of becoming a coffee taster is always there for you. Although you are likely to find yourself in an abyss of confusion when it comes to attaching a numerical value to the aromatic profile of the coffee beans.
Factors to be prioritised during a coffee tasting
Tasting coffee and cupping them is not as enchanting as they sound, rather there remains a massive hassle to accomplish these tasks. Your difficulty during coffee cupping ends with this blog as here we have presented some of the primary factors that are to be given importance during the tasting.
- Acquiring a sound knowledge of the growing conditions and origin of coffee beans is mandatory to identify even the slightest variations in flavour.
- Never forget to gather details like the roasting process and time of coffee beans to understand the reasons for deviation in aroma and taste profile.
- Coffee beans are usually blended to offer a mixed flavour to the customers as per their preferences. Being a coffee taster or an aspirant in this job role, you must possess a clear idea about the mixing technique of the beans.
Final Thoughts
Coffee cupping is undoubtedly one of the highly important processes to serve the best coffee to customers. Want to discover more about Rio Minas green coffee beans? Feel free to post your queries in the comment section below.