Home cupping
Cupping is how roasters and buyers taste coffee side by side: every cup brewed the same way, so the only thing that changes is the coffee. It’s the easiest way to learn what you like, compare two bags, or taste a roaster’s range with friends. This version is adapted for home from the Specialty Coffee Association’s Coffee Value Assessment (CVA).
Score it on your phone
Run the flight in the app: a cupping timer, the same sheet for up to four coffees, a suggested ranking and an optional blind mode that hides which coffee is which until you reveal.
Dose for your cups
8.25 g of coffee for every 150 mL of water.
Printable sheets
A one-page how-to and a tasting sheet for four coffees (A–D), sized for Letter and A4.
What you need
- 2–4 coffees and matching cups or glasses (150–300 mL), one per coffee
- A scale that reads 0.1 g, a grinder and a kettle
- A timer, two spoons for skimming, a rinse cup of hot water
- A spoon for each taster, water to drink, and a tasting sheet each
Run a flight
- PrepLabel, weigh and grind. Use matching, clean cups and label them A–D (on the bottom if you want it blind). Weigh the dose for your cup size, and grind each dose just before brewing, a little coarser than paper-filter drip. Smell the dry grounds: that's the fragrance.
- 0:00Pour. Start a timer with the first pour. Fill every cup with water at about 93 °C to the same weight, making sure all the grounds get wet. Pour in a fixed order and keep that order for the break.
- 4:00Break, smell, then skim. Lean in close, push through the crust with a spoon and stir about three times while you smell the aroma. When every cup is broken, lift off the floating grounds and foam with two spoons.
- ~70 °CTaste. Around 8–10 minutes in, slurp a spoonful so it sprays across your palate. Note flavour, aftertaste, acidity, sweetness and mouthfeel. Taste at least three rounds as the cups cool; cooler coffee often shows more.
- RevealRank first, identify later. Rank the flight before anyone reveals what's what. With more than four coffees, run several flights and compare the winners at the end.
Filling out the tasting sheet
- Coffee / roaster / code: what’s in the cup, or just a code if you’re tasting blind.
- Fragrance & aroma: words for the dry grounds and the wet crust. Memories count (“grandma’s jam”).
- Flavour & aftertaste: what you taste, and what stays after you swallow.
- Acidity, sweetness, mouthfeel: circle one dot, 1 = low to 5 = high. This is how much, not how good.
- Flavours: tick every group you notice: Fruity, Floral, Sweet, Nutty/cocoa, Spice, Roasted, Green, Sour/fermented, Other.
- As it cools: what opened up, faded or changed between rounds.
- Overall 1–9: how much you liked it. 1 = extremely low, 5 = neither high nor low, 9 = extremely high. This is the CVA’s affective scale and the same one the app’s advanced tasting log uses.
- One word: the word that will remind you of this cup later.
- Flight ranking: put the four in order before the reveal, then note the most distinctive and what tied the flight together.
Sharing one cup safely
Give each coffee its own serving spoon and use it only to move coffee into a taster’s own cup or spoon. Never put a tasted spoon back in a shared cup, and rinse the serving spoon in hot water between dips.
Log it in the app
For a whole flight, use a cupping session. For one cup you brewed, turn on the Advanced tasting log in Profile → Settings to record the same details for a cup: 0–15 intensities, flavour groups and the 1–9 overall impression. A circled dot on paper is roughly 3 on the 0–15 scale (so 4 dots ≈ 12).
Based on the SCA’s CVA, simplified for home use. This is not an official SCA form and isn’t endorsed by the SCA. Read about the Coffee Value Assessment.