laying it on the table

7/29/2019 Laying It on the Table

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24 r o a s t September | Octo

conti

by Andi C. Trindle Mer

As I said in the rst half of this two-part state of

industry series, when youve been doing some

a while, you become compelled to step back and

look to make sure youre doing something worthwhile and

doing it the right way. This sentiment is especially true if

a perfectionist. Although I have grudgingly abandoned the

achieving self-perfection, I seem to still expect it of system

computers, cable TVand cupping. Coee cuppingas our

formal and, thus far, only universally agreed-upon sensory

assessment tool that has very real nancial implications

that should be perfect. Right?

By all accounts the industry has come a long way over t

but perfection in cupping is probably as likely as perfection

an industry, we may need to pursue the next e volution of c

at the very least, we need some reection and realignment

on the

A look at

t stat of Cupp

Laying

Table

photocourtesyo Font Cofee


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Laying It on the Table | Cupping (continued)

continuedon page28

photo byChad Trewick

Why We Cup

Before we dig into some of the reasons for re-evaluation of the

cupping process, lets look at some of the reasons why we cup in

the rst place. According to the Specialty Coee Association of

Americas cupping curriculum, we cup coees for the following

reasons:

Purchasing

Quality and price discovery

Subject to Approval of Sample (SAS) applications

Quality assurance (incorporating roast proling, as well as

consistency monitoring)

Blending

Palate enrichment

Education/training

These are some valuable motivationsparticularly those

that inuence which coees are bought and sold and at what

prices. And, as Brian Ali, green coee sourcing manager at

Minnesota-based Caribou Coee, states, Cupping provides a

simple tool for evaluating multiple samples in a convenient

time frame and with a minimum required sample size.

Without spending any more time acknowledging the value

and need for cupping, we can probably all agree that we need to

have a formal, ecient system for evaluating coees. But

Is the Cupping

Process Working?

Short answer: yes. More accurate answer: not wholly.

As Martin Diedrich, founder of California-based Kean

Coee, says, Its so amazing to go to origin and be able to

speak the same language. This simple statement reects

whats generally working with cupping. We have developed

an industry language that allows us to understand each other

across borders. This language of ours includes vocabulary and

numbersi.e., descriptors and scoreswhich theoretically

help us agree on an objective coee quality. From here, we can

make informed buying and selling decisions that allow our

businesses to succeed while, in turn, securing the growth of

specialty within the greater coee industry.

Getting back to the longer and more realistic answer of not

wholly, however, imperfections of the cupping process are

manyfrom protocols to calibration to bias.

Protocols

Protocols is the term generally adopted within our industry

to identify the best practice/industry guidelines for preparing

a formal cupping. Protocols for consistency in roast degree,

steeping time, grind degree, water quality and temperature,

lighting, and many other factors exist to ensure that a cupping

session is as scientic as possible, thereby yielding (in theory)

objective results. Because coee tasting is inherently rife with

uncontrollable variables, such as the dierences between tasters

(taste buds, taste experience, psychology and physiology to name

a few), its particularly important to identify and systematically

manage these controllable variables.

The SCAA, Cup of Excellence and CQI training programs,

among other programs and companies in the coee industry,

have done an excellent job instilling cupping protocols around the

globe in recent years. Although these organizations impart slight

variation in protocols, they generally espouse similar guidelines,

and all agree that consistent practices from session to session

are critical. However, in general, scientic practices are notconsistently followed in most cupping labs, says K.C. OKeefe,

founder of Caf Verde Peru, a coeehouse in Lima, and the chair

of the SCAAs professional cupper development committee. This

introduces unacceptable margin for errors in extraction and avor

development in the cup, OKeefe notes.


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Laying It on the Table | A Look at the State of Cupping (continued)

continuedon page30

Indeed, my own impetus for writing this article came from

my frustrations owing to variant protocols in a lab setting. Earlier

this year, I found myself participating in origin cuppings where

some important, basic protocols werent followed. The intention to

host a formal cupping was very clear, and these producers (unlike

most around the globe) had appropriate equipment and the general

setup for professional cupping. (Credit must go to dedicated NGO,

industry partners, and government organizations around the world

for devotedly dispensing cupping

training and supplies in recent

decades.) Nonetheless, training and/

or resources simply didnt support

meticulous analysis. In these cases,water temperature wasnt monitored,

roast degrees between samples were

wide, and cuppers did not rinse their

spoons from cup to cup. There were

more problems than these, but these

particular inconsistencies stuck out as highly problematic. Could

I really make an informed buying decision or even provide helpful

commentary about coees where so many inuential variables were

uncontrolled? (Note: A buying decision on the ground at origin is

separate from a nal pre-shipment sample approval process.)

To be clear, protocol lapses are in no way limited to origin-side

operations. I posit that many professional coee buyers and sellers

dont maintain proper protocols 100 percent of the time and some

dont even attempt them.

In addition, some question whether existing protocols are

sucient and wholly accurate. As one example, Eton Tsuno,

director of coee at Sacramentos Temple Coee Roasters, suggests

that water protocols should be published in exact gram weight of

water in addition to traditional

volume recommendations, since

this echoes the current habits of

baristas in measuring and evaluating

espresso and lter drip extractions.The quality of water is even more

important as water comprises

approximately 98.75 percent of the

brewed beverage in a traditional

cupping. Despite the importance of

water quality, however, labs around the world (and even within the

United States) dont use a standardized water base.

For Christopher Schooley, a roaster who works with Coee Shrub,

a huge weakness of current cupping practice exists in the roast degree

I posit that many professional

coffee buyers and sellers dont

maintain proper protocols 100percent of the time and some

dont even attempt them.


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continuedon page32

recommendation. You have to look at more than one

roast, he says, because there are problems with taking

a qualitative measurement of both acidity and body, two

things greatly inuenced by roast development, unless you

are looking at a couple of dierent roasts.

OKeefe also feels that the sample-roasting

specications are too lax and instead requires that his

samples are roasted within 10:3011:15 [minutes] rather

than the eight- to 12-minute window of the SCAA.

Certainly, there are many other conditions and

variables in cupping that might be better controlled or

dierently managed. Without postulating conclusions

here, I suggest to the industry that we review existingprotocols and best practices to see where we can improve

upon them in the interest of achieving greater objectivity

and balance of results.

Of course, until everyone is rigorously employing

protocols, creating more of them or adapting them doesnt

x anything.

Calibration

Even if we had a perfect tasting process available to us

and we employed its protocols religiously, a more dicult

challenge manifests in the concept of calibration. Calibration is

the notion that, assuming equality of sample and process, cuppers

around the world are consistently infusing vocabulary and scoring

with like meaning. Are the words citrus, fruity, savory and oral

applied consistently among cuppers of the same coee, for example,


photoby Chad Trewick

or does fruity mean cherry to some and over-fermented to others?

Is an 85-point coee in one lab at least in the range of 8486 among

cuppers of the same coee elsewhere? For cupping to serve its critical

purpose as a buying and selling tool and price determiner, we have to

have semantic consensus among our professional tasters. As Tsuno

states, [Without calibration] pricing will break down, since in our

small sector of coee, price should

be in direct relation to quality/

cupping score. (Tsuno also suggests

that availability, sustainability and

traceability are part of the pricing

equation.) If we arent speaking the

same language, how do we determine

fairly if a coee is worth a dierential

of +50 versus +250? And, are we doing

ourselves a disservice by selling coees

to consumers at prices they arent

really worth?

Over the years, I have frequently

questioned whether we are universally

calibrated as tasters. For example,

many times, I have been witness to or

part of debates over whether a fruity

sample (in the same cupping session)

is over-fermented and defective or

whether it is a 90-plus-rated coee.

Well-respected and experienced tasters

can land on opposite sides of this

debate.


5/632 r o a s t September | Octo


co

Tsuno, having also experienced this

particular argument, states, I believe many

people need more training in identifying

uncontrolled ferment as a defect since what

we like about honeys and naturals is a result

in controlled ferment. Tsuno is exactly

right: as an industry, we need more training

to calibrate. In this particular case, we need

more training of processing manifestations

both controlled and uncontrolledto

nd some objective end to these debates.

However, even if we can come to agreement

and can taste accurately whether fruit is

caused by happenstance versus deliberate

eort in processing, I suspect we will still

have variation on what is positive fruit

versus fruit that is defective. Some of these

issues get into bias (which we will discuss

later in the article), but some of it is

because we dont have universal language

agreement.

Despite the frequency of these debates

over the years, to my pleasant surprise

when I questioned some fellow tasters

about calibration, they were largely

positive about their success in matching

their results with their outside partners.

For Ali, Caribou nds that they trend

in the same direction as our industry

contemporaries more often than not.

OKeefe asserted that his industry partners

consistently score/calibrate within

our results, but he also acknowledges

that they have some trading partners

whose results are very inconsistent.

For OKeefe, these inconsistencies are

attributable to counterparts neither

scientically running the lab, nor

consistently cupping, though, and

not problems of semantic variation.

Ali also says that for calibration the

greatest challenge is practices in the

lab. Without doubt, poor protocols yield

result variation, but part of the problem is

semantic. We are not speaking the same

languageboth in words and numbers.

Scoring certainly shows itself to be

widely varied among dierent tasters and

dierent groups of tasters. Obviously,

exact score matching isnt possible or even

ideal, but it seems important that we

are generally in agreement with a fairly

narrow range of, say, two to three points

as a two- to three-point variation can

put a coee into a dierent quality and

corresponding price categorization.

This group score just manifested itself

in our oce as we hosted a tasting of the

Nicaragua Cup of Excellence (COE) coees.

Generally speaking, the entire group of

more than 12 outside tasters, plus our

four cuppers, ranked the various lots with

scores ranging from 82 to 90 and generally

a solid few points (or more) lower than the

COE jury panel across the board (all jury

scores were above 85). Protocol variation

like roast degree might very well have

been dierent and the inuence of time

between the jurors evaluation and ours

was likely impactful (as an agricultural

product, green coees properties will

change over time regardless of sample

preparation and evaluation methodology),

but who is right in these scenarios, and

can there even be a right score? After

all, cultural consumer preferences are

distinctly dierent and one communitys

good is another communitys

outstanding, which warrant very

dierent scores. Still, with purchasing

decisions and price points at stake,

calibration has merit.

The good news is that some level of

calibration among knowledgeable and

practiced tasters can happen. Tsuno

advises that one should learn protocol

from an industry professional, and

constantly review and communicate

scores with other cuppers. In particular to

scoring calibration, he suggests cupping

true commercial, 60- to 70-point coees

and 90-plus-point coees in order to put

80-point coees into relation. (Although

we have many discrepancies when looking

at smaller score ranges, we are calibrated

enough as an industry that this 10-point-

range categorization is generally agreed

upon and, therefore, a tasting can be

organized eectively.)

For Caribou, Ali suggests that

continued exposure to events through

the SCAA and around the industrythe

likes of barista competitions, Coees

of the Year judging, COE events and

Rainforest Alliance cuppingshas

rounded our abilities and helped us

develop and maintain our consistency.

OKeefe echoes COE participation as an

important calibration tool, in addition to

honest, open sharing of blind cupping

scoring/categorization with your trading

partners.

Bias

One of the most prevalent problems with

the cupping process is the inuence of

bias. Fortunately, many biases are readily

apparent and relatively easily mitigated.

For example, if a cupper knows that aparticular sample is from a producer who

pays scrupulous attention to quality or

from a farm with an excellent reputation,

they may be inclined, without conscious

awareness, to score it higher than they

would score a coee coming from an

unknown farm or from an origin with

a generally poor reputation for quality.

Similarly, if a well-known industry taster

has scored a coee highly, then others may

trend their own scoring on the high side.

And, of course, the reverse is true as

well. A sample might be very good, but,

because a cupper is disinclined to believe it

based on past experience, they score more

conservatively, awarding it an 85 score versus

a deserved 88. Or, sometimes

feel that everyone elsea CO

a group of vocal roasters, for

overrating a particular coee

critical of it in an eort to ass

bias. Allowing these inuen

evaluation is, of course, unp

wed all like to believe we do


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However, even among experienced tasters,

these biases can occur despite best intentions

and rm belief that we are in control of

our partialities. Human psychology is very

powerful.

So, cup blind. This simply means, cup

without knowing what youre cupping. Have

someone else set up your tasting sessions

ideally using codes only and dont even try to

gure out or guess what you may be tasting.

Just taste and evaluate honestly and with

focus. Blind cupping isnt always possible or

practical, and sometimes there are distinct

advantages to cupping with knowledge of

what you are tastingcalibration training,

for example. Nonetheless, as participants in a

process with results that impact pricing paid

to farmers and feedback that can inuence

their future care of their beans, we should

control the controllable variables.

The Next Phase

Ultimately, I feel that the cupping process

is a worthwhile and important one, but

its a process fraught with imperfections;

the current cupping process will never

achieve true objectivity. Of course, we

dont necessarily need complete objectivity;

there are cultural preferences and biases

that create a need for subjective variety in

the marketplace. The key as professionals,

however, is in having a system with as much

impartiality as possible. As specialty coeetasters, it can be easy to think of our job

as just choosing the very best coees from

around the world to showcase, but we should

remember that our decisions at the cupping

table have real nancial implications for

hard-working coee producers around the

globe. So, knowing the limitations of the


cupping process, as Schooley recommends, it

would be considerably helpful for [buyers] to

look at coees a couple of dierent times and

in dierent iterations before making a nal

judgment. Maybe we can all agree to do at

least that while we re-evaluate and improve

cupping evaluation in the long run.

ANDI C. TRINDLE MERSCHis a greencoeetrader withAtlantic Specialty Coee, Inc. in

California, whereshe also runs thequality-control lab.Shehas been workingin specialty coeesince 1989. Andi

has volunteered withthe SCAA TrainingCommittee since

1995and joined theboard ofdirectors inMarch2010. She

canbereached at [email protected].

laying it on the table

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