Page 79 - #59 English

Your Experience Determines Your Vocabulary

When training cuppers, I often say, “All of you are
already excellent, professional tasters. If you were not,
you would be dead. You’ve been tasting things all your
life, with perfect accuracy. What’s lacking is the vocabu-
lary to describe your sensations.”
When doing formal cupping training, such as in the
Q-grader program, there is a strong effort to standardize
the evaluation, so that “8.25 acidity quality” from a cupper
in Tokyo is the same as “8.25 acidity quality” from a cup-
per in Amsterdam. Of course, there are always small inac-
curacies and differences of opinion between cuppers, but
these attempts to create a “universal language of coffee”
have been hugely successful and valuable so far. There’s
always more work to do, but standardized cupping proto-
cols have done much to bring the wide world of interna-
tional coffee into one, mutually-intelligible set of terms.
Nevertheless, when people are training, or when they
are talking to their friends, or when they are trying to The next day, Daniel went to a Filipino restaurant
communicate with their customers, they inevitably fall and ordered sinigang and said, “Yes, you were right. That
back on a vocabulary they have been learning their whole coffee was a lot like sinigang.”
life. If a customer asks you to describe a coffee, you’d In my experience, Western cuppers will often iden-
never begin, “Well, the acidity is 8.25.” tify certain coffees that have a complex acidity rich in
Rosario Juan, owner and Chief Extractor of Coffee at phosphoric acid to taste like “tomato soup” or “beef
Commune in Manila, Philippines, tells about a training with broth.” You hear these terms used about fine Kenyan
the expert Ethiopian coffee trainer, Daniel Mulu of CQI. coffees, for example. Such terms can raise eyebrows
“There was this Honduran coffee that tasted like among other cuppers, because beef broth does not sound
sinigang,” says Juan. “Of course he had no idea what very positive, but its usually reserved (by Westerners,
sinigang was. ” especially North Americans) for very fine coffees.
This is just one example of how cultural biases and
experiences can give us very strong, specific mental impres-
sions, even though they also often make it more difficult to
It’s a Filipino dish: a sour broth, communicate those impressions to the rest of the world.
Korn Sanguankeaw, Head roaster of Roots Coffee,
usually with beef, sometimes Bangkok, explains that often fruits that Westerners use
to describe coffee, like plum, blueberry, and raspberry,
with prawns, and we use a are difficult for Thai cuppers to identify. “Our local cup-
pers are more likely to use local flavors to describe them.”
souring agent for it. In fact, he even says that the Thai palate is more
forgiving of sour flavors in coffee, and even astringency,
Usually tamarind, or young because many preferred local fruits are indeed sour and
astringent. So it’s not just a matter of descriptive words,
guava. It’s a sour soup, but it’s but in fact a matter of perceived quality. A coffee that a
Westerner might mark down for lacking sweetness and
also kind of savory. having too much astringency, a Thai cupper might be
more forgiving with.
Something I’ve noticed among my many cuppings
around Asia, is that a greater familiarity with certain
fruits can lead to misunderstandings. For example, I
had been cupping in North America, Latin America,
and Africa for 10 years before I ever came to Asia. In
all those years, I heard the terms “papaya” and “mango”
reserved for only the most elite, exotic coffees, those
scoring 90 and above.

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