Page 18 - #58 English

Coffee & Five Sense

Subjective vs. Objective Cupping & flavor description
first approach of coffee taste
Sense of taste is a relatively subjective feeling. Actually we
notice a reality in every cupping test or competition rating form that In professional coffee world, cupping
participant should describe their current feeling honestly, all descrip- is the major method of tasting. Here, I try
tive vocabularies and quantization degrees should be defined neu- to explain this concept in simple words.
trally and observed in all directions.
Most of the people can feel 1 Definition of Cupping
lost at the first time of cupping.
According to their experience, Cupping is a way that practitioners
drinking a cappuccino in a beauti- judge coffee’s quality. Though a SOP (stan-
ful café while enjoying chat with dard operation process) – in a quantified
a friend is a normal thing. But here, container, put certain ratio of coffee pow-
in a quiet and closed environment, der and water (proper grinding degree and
they need to perform cupping with fixed water temperature) and soak for a
a spoon and a loud slurp! while, then extract floating coffee grounds.
In addition,wine and tea Grade this coffee objectively based on its
have special processing.For in- features (dry aroma, cup aroma, sourness/
stance, while stored in different flavor/richness/balance through sucking).
barrels and fermented to various By following this SOP and avoid human
degrees, coffee beans will taste intervention coming from different brew
naturally, as they are suppose to methods, tasters taste the coffee based on
taste (discussion here excludes their own sensory experience, score the
coffee beans baked with different coffee in all dimension rather than per-
spices). This is to say that the sonal preference.
features of coffee in terms of
fragrance, flavor and sense of
touch is a little bit weaker than
wine and tea. It is really very hard for one person to figure out the
difference of coffee beans cultivated in different regions and pro-
cessed in different ways.
First of all, we need to make it clear there are distance and
difference between the features of observed objective and your
feeling of these features. For example, 80% of non-trained tast-
ers described washed Yirgacheffe as a light and sweet coffee at
the first time of tasting. If I ask, was it sour? 70% of them would
say that it is not sour. The fact is the acid degree of Yirgacheffe
is not low. The reason of their feeling is the acid degree of Yir-
gacheffe, which is similar to a fresh fruit (similar to citrus), some
high quality beans even have flower fragrance. The after taste of
caramel is also very good, all of which makes tasters think it is
not sour. However, if they are trained in related topics, tasters
will become very sensitive to acid degree and can tell differ-
ent sourness from each other, which helps tasters to enjoy the
sweet and sour feelings of coffee and one more time proves that:

After practicing,

everyone can taste coffee. TASTE

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