Dear Diary is hosting a community cupping event at 5:30pm Tuesday, April 19th, 2022. Space is limited, so please RSVP on Eventbrite.

What is cupping?

An essential step in all food manufacturing, including coffee roasting, is selecting ingredients. There are hundreds of coffee growers in dozens of regions around the world. Cupping is the process by which a roaster makes final selections. At this point, they know what function they need their beans to serve (such as flavor, mouthfeel, or body), and they’ve narrowed in on a few varieties that fit the bill. 

At a cupping, the roaster tastes samples they’ve obtained from importers. These samples would have been roasted according to the desired function of each bean, and brewed into black coffee.

What do you do at a cupping?

The goal of cupping is to document the unique flavor of each roasted coffee. A coffee blend is essentially a drink recipe, and knowing what your ingredients taste like is critical to recipe development. 

At a cupping, the roaster will pour a cup of each black coffee. Traditionally, tasters would walk around with a spoon and a notebook. They’d literally (and loudly) slurp a spoonful of each brew, and jot down flavor notes as they tried each one. At Dear Diary, the process is the same, but we pour coffee into little portion cups instead of using spoons.

How do I describe flavor?

There’s no right or wrong way to describe flavor; it’s a very subjective thing! A nice, well rounded picture develops when everyone at a cupping offers their personal experience.

You might be surprised how much mouthfeel can influence your flavor perception too. For example, a coffee that coats the tongue is probably going to strike you as chocolatey just because we have such a strong association between it and the tongue-coating sensation of cocoa butter. 

Really tasting something is a complex process that takes focus. Take your time. Feel free to sample the same coffee over and over if you’d like. Sometimes comparing coffees is helpful since taste is also relative.

What happens after cupping?

The descriptions that come from a cupping event are enormously helpful for many reasons. As mentioned, the collective experiences of a group are going to paint more accurate pictures of each coffee than one roaster’s personal opinion. Our descriptions will help with coffee blend recipe development, and they will help customers purchase coffee they like.

Most importantly, community cuppings give the neighborhood a chance to influence what specialty coffees are served at their local shop.