Cupping Room

Anthony’s favorite spot!

Our cupping room was designed to welcome guests and groups of people experience cupping coffee. Traditional cupping tables spin and have room for only four tasters. Owner, Anthony Valerio built and tiled Café Excellence’s cupping table himself. Our table was built at bar level so several people can experience the cupping. This is a great advantage for training coffee house staff or chefs who are interested in Café Excellence.

The main purpose of the room is to taste green origin coffee and sample roast to decide whether to purchase a lot or bags.

Product Development

Another purpose of the room is for product development. This is where Anthony and his team blend different origin coffee to develop a proprietary blend with a unique taste profile they want to achieve.

Quality Control

The cupping room is also used for Quality Control. Samples of finished goods are regularly pulled for testing. The first test is to check the roast color, then grind if applicable. Secondly, we test the oxygen level using a meter and a visual packaging check. The product is then weighed and tasted.

The cupping process is a series of steps in a systematic format to allow the comparison of different coffees. The cupping can be blind or open.

A Blind Cupping

In a blind cupping the comparison is without information on the coffees.

An Open Cupping

Open is when you are given information on the coffees such as country and region, estate, farm or co-operative group, the lot number, altitude and when harvested and the roast profile used. You are also informed of the purpose and goal of the cupping. The purpose may be to evaluate the green offered in making a decision to buy or a Quality Control to check a roast against a previous roast.

Steps to cupping

Step One

First we grind the coffee course, measure out 2 tablespoons and place into a cup. We always sample more then one cup – three or four of each coffee in fact! This gives us the ability to find a flaw if present.

Step Two

Once all of the coffees are measured and ground we raise the grounds to our nose and smell the coffee. The dry aromas are more pronounced then the wet. When smelling dry coffee think about what the aromas reminding you of. Is it a garden vegetable – for example, a potato, cucumber, flower, wood, nut or even a spice?

Step Three

Our next step is to pour boiling water into the cups in a circular motion – wetting all of the grounds. We let the coffee steep for 3 minutes, then take our spoon and break the surface. At the same time lowering our nose and smelling all of the wet aromas that are being released. Once the smelling is complete we remove the floating foam and grounds from the top of the cups and let them cool.

Step Four

Once the coffees have cooled we are ready to taste. With a spoon we slurp the coffee across our tongue. When tasting coffee we are look for three main attributes.

The first is acidity, how much does your tongue perk up? Next is the body of the coffee, how thick is the mouth feel? Finally, what are the different tastes? Fruits (a blueberry or lemon)? Vegetables (a potato or cucumber)? Nuts (almonds or walnuts)? Or spice (pepper or clove)? You may also find caramel, malt or dark chocolate.