As lecherously shady as it sounds, a "cupping" turned out to be not so bad after all. On a deliciously sunny and prematurely wintery Seattle saturday afternoon I headed over to Stumptown with my friend Ken to see what a cupping exactly is.
To give some context here, Stumptown is an independent coffee house from Portland which has just opened in Seattle. They have revolutionized how coffee is bought, processed and how the coffee growers themselves are treated in the whole process. You can drink your fancy cup of coffee and empower the coffee grower, his/her family and workers. Everybody wins!
On to the cupping which basically consists of a row of neatly arranged coffee cups in Stumptown's basement. Each type of coffee is poured into three cups and each set of three cups was separated by a cup with plain water. Our host, Kyle, explained that we would be tasting coffee from a single cup using a spoon, dipping the spoon in the water and moving on to the next cup. There is a need to have 3 cups with the same coffee because sometimes a single bad bean can skew the flavor of the coffee. Tasting the same coffee from three separate cups gives a better sense of the true flavor by discounting any undesirable variations. Kyle then proceeded to "break the crust" by removing the frothy foam you see in the picture (note picture is from this site)
The tasting technique itself is also very interesting. You basically have to slurp the coffee so that you utilize your taste buds. However swallowing is not advised because the palette and the throat become desensitized as the cupping proceeds. Kyle proceeded to demonstrate the technique with a very aggressive and impressive slurp :) We followed suit and proceeded to spit out the coffee after each slurp.
Now to the coffee's themselves. I didnt note the names but there was one from Gautemala, two from Ethopia and two more that I forget. My coffee ignorance was soon exposed another guy commented "definitely has some blueberry" - I responded with "Oh, I didnt know there was blueberry in coffee beans". He then patiently explained that fruits, flowers etc are used to describe the taste and smell associated with a particular coffee... wow!
Anyway, I soon got into the act by pronouncing that one of the coffees had a "nutty" flavor. Kyle agreed by saying that it had a pistachio like aftertaste. All in all it was a great experience - the coffees had subtle variation in acidity. Some were tangy, some citrusy and others nutty and fruity. The most fascinating part came at the end when Kyle explained who the coffees came from. The names of the families, the farming practices, the variations in flavor due to slight changes in elevation are all things that I never used to think about when horsing down my daily mocha. Coffee drinking is now a more holistic experience for me
Oh, btw I also got one of these:
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