"CoffeeCupping" news and stories

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is the sixth in a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Early in our relationship, whenever I told my husband I was headed to a cupping, he (a coffee lover but not a fanatic like me) would imagine something, er, otherwise-related. Now that he knows cupping as a coffee-tasting ritual he might be disappointed -- or relieved -- but at least he understands why I'm a bit jittery when I come home from one.

The cupping process traces back to the 19th century, when beans were graded basically on a "yes" or "no" scale: Too many defects (like disease or mold) earned an ix-nay, while just about everything else was considered acceptable.

Today, cupping serves several different purposes: At the coffee's point of origin it allows farmers, importers, brokers and roasters to test the quality of a crop; after roasting, the roasters themselves will cup coffees for consistency, flavor profile and to detect the effects of aging; and at the consumer level, coffee cuppings are the rough (and fun!) equivalent of wine tastings, and are becoming widely available to the public.

There's a pretty interesting story in the New York Times about the prevalence of coffee "cuppings" - basically wine tastings for java, minus the spitting. Aficionados sit around discussing different roasts, trying to find the right words to describe the subtle flavors of a cup of Kenyan or Guatemalan roast.

Now, I drink coffee every day, usually multiple cups, black. Aside from water, it's probably the single consumable I have most regularly. But while I can certainly taste the difference between the watery, acidic, sewage brown stuff sold in most gas stations and a good French roast, that's about where it ends. When people tell me they drive half an hour for special beans or they 'hate' the (to me) perfectly ordinary cappuccinos at my local cafe, I just shrug. I mean, I'm willing to believe that other people have the ability to discern flavors I can't sense. But is a bag of beans from a single farm lot discernibly different than beans from a handful of farms in the same region? In a town with dozens of independent coffee shops, is it really plausible that one has the absolute 'best' coffee?

What do you think? Do you have sensitive coffee palates?

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