How to Assess Coffee Quality

The Independent Voice
Newsletter of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association
How to Assess Coffee
Quality Shawn Steiman is author of The Hawai‘i
Coffee Book: A Gourmet’s Guide from Kona
to Kaua‘i and owner of Coffea Consulting.
His company offers quality assessment
services and education.
coffeaconsulting.googlepages.com
By now, we’ve discovered that a cup
of coffee can be pretty amazing and
that it is important to understand that
amazingness. But how do we assess
the quality of coffee?
Many people will say that all you
have to do is drink the coffee to
know the coffee: brew the coffee
using your standard method, pour it
into your favorite cup and taste it
(where tasting is drinking
conscientiously). While this simple
method sounds reasonable, it is
actually inadequate. People are
thinking, feeling, complex beings.
While these traits may set us apart
from the rest of the creatures on
Earth, they get in the way of our
objectivity and ability to be
instruments. When you taste coffee,
you bring a slew of emotional,
intellectual and psychosocial
baggage with you, even though you
don’t realize it. It is not just you and
the coffee, but you and your world.
You simply can’t tease out the
coffee and objectively evaluate the
brew.
The best way to evaluate coffee
quality is by cupping. Cupping is
the formal method of experiencing
coffee that requires minimal gear
and little effort to learn. However, it
takes a great deal of experience and
thought to perfect the skill.
In cupping, we don’t drink the
coffee from a mug. Instead, we
slurp it and spit it out. We use no
fancy brewing equipment, just hot
water, bowls, and a spoon. We
don’t try to memorize anything,
rather, we record our discoveries on
a score sheet. Cupping is designed
to be different from our usual coffee
experience.
By using a method of coffee
ingestion that is so completely
foreign to our regular experience, we
create a space that is reserved only
for analytical thinking. When we
cup, we aren’t thinking about
breakfast or a meeting or our friends.
We are concentrating on the acts or
slurping and spitting and the
organoleptic experience wrought by
the coffee.
Cupping isn’t easy. People don’t
often dissect their organoleptic
experiences. Thus, describing
coffee by its characteristics and
descriptors is challenging. It takes
lots of practice to not only put words
to those experiences but to
understand the range of those
experiences. Fortunately, anybody
can become skilled at cupping. It
just requires time, effort, patience,
and passion for coffee.
Editors Note: Mahalo Shawn !