Slurping on Purpose: How We Cup Our Coffees

If you ever hear aggressive slurping from the back of our shop, don't worry — that's quality control. Cupping is the coffee industry's shared ritual for evaluating coffee, standardized enough that a cupper in Stuart, a producer in Antioquia, and an importer in Oakland can all taste the same lot the same way and compare notes. It's how coffee talks to itself.

The protocol

Cupping strips brewing down to its most neutral form — no machines, no paper, no technique to hide behind:

1. Grind a measured dose into each bowl (the classic ratio is about 8.25 g per 150 ml of water) — several bowls per coffee, because single cups can lie.
2. Smell the dry grounds. Pour water just off the boil straight onto them. Wait four minutes while a crust of grounds forms and the aromas build underneath.
3. Break the crust — push it back with a spoon, nose right down at the surface. This is the most aromatic moment the coffee will ever give you.
4. Skim, wait for it to cool a bit, then taste with a hard slurp — the spray aerates the coffee across your whole palate. Loud is correct.

Coffees get scored on aroma, flavor, acidity, body, sweetness, balance, uniformity, and cleanliness — and crucially, tasted again as they cool, because cooling coffee confesses everything a hot cup hides.

How cupping runs this company

Every coffee we buy earned its place blind on this table — samples cupped without knowing which is which, so the score can't play favorites. Every roast profile we develop was chosen by cupping the same coffee roasted several ways. Production batches get cupped against reference. And it goes both ways: on our Colombian farm project, agronomist Sandra Tamayo cups the farm's lots at origin and publishes the score sheets right on that page — the same ritual, an ocean away, telling us how the trees are doing.

Try it at home (casually)

You don't need certification to steal the method: brew two coffees side by side, same recipe, and taste them against each other as they cool — hot, warm, room temperature. Comparison is a flavor microscope. One afternoon of tasting two coffees honestly will teach your palate more than a year of drinking one coffee automatically.