How to host a coffee cupping at home or in a café

A cupping teaches most when the coffees have one clear difference between them. Good themes:

• Processing: the same origin washed, natural and honey-processed.
• Origins: an Ethiopian, a Colombian and a Sumatran side by side.
• Roast: one coffee at two roast levels.
• Freshness: the same coffee at a week and at six weeks after roasting.
• "Which do we like?": a few coffees a café is choosing between.

SCA 102 caps a session at six coffees, and three or four is plenty for beginners. Buy enough for five cups per coffee if you want to judge consistency, or two or three cups if you just want to describe them.

Knowing a coffee's name, price or roaster changes what people perceive. Before guests arrive, have someone who will not taste label the bottom of each cup with a code (A, B, C, or random numbers), write down the key, and arrange the cups so the codes are hidden. Mix up the order on the table so one coffee's cups aren't always together if you are judging uniformity.

Reveal only after everyone has recorded their notes. The reveal and the discussion that follows are where people learn the most.

Use the equipment list in the step-by-step cupping guide. For a group you also need:

• One spoon per taster, plus two rinse cups of hot water per table.
• A spittoon per taster: a paper cup works.
• One kettle per three coffees at least. SCA 102 says all coffees in a session should be brewed at the same time, ideally one carafe per person.
• A timer that everyone can hear, and forms or phones for notes.
• A neutral room: no cooking smells, scented candles or strong perfume, and ask tasters not to wear fragrance.

Table space matters. SCA 102 suggests a cupping table for six people should have at least 0.9 m² of surface, and that tasters move around a stationary table. At home, a kitchen island or a long table works if people can walk around it.

Weigh 8.25 g of coffee per 150 mL of cup capacity and grind each cup separately, just before the cupping. Put the cups in rows, one row per coffee, with the codes facing away from the tasters. Heat water to 93 °C (± 3 °C).

If you are running a public cupping in a café, prepare one or two practice cups so first-timers can try slurping before the real thing.

Take two minutes before you pour to cover:

1. The order of events: dry fragrance, pour, steep, break, skim, taste in rounds.
2. How to slurp, and that spitting is expected.
3. Rinse your spoon before every cup. If you prefer, use the modified protocol: one serving spoon per cup to pour into your own spoon or a small glass.
4. Silence while tasting. Keep reactions to yourself until the discussion.
5. What to record: words first, then intensity, then (optionally) a score. Point people to the tasting vocabulary.

• Fragrance: everyone walks the table smelling the dry grounds.
• Pour: each person fills one coffee's cups to the rim, all at the same time. Start the timer.
• Break: after 3 to 5 minutes, split the cups so different people get to break at least one cup of as many coffees as possible. SCA 102 suggests exactly this.
• Skim: once all crusts are broken, skim every cup.
• Taste: start at about 70 °C. Walk the table in rounds, at least three, as the coffee cools.
• Record: give people a few quiet minutes to finish their notes.

Go coffee by coffee. Ask each taster for one or two words, without scores at first. Look for agreement: when three people independently say "stone fruit", that is a strong signal. Disagreement is useful too. It often means one person found something the others missed, or that people use the same word differently, which is what calibration fixes over time.

Then reveal the key. Ask whether anything surprised people. Finish by asking which coffee they would buy, which is often different from the one that "scored" best.

• Cap the numbers. Six to eight guests per table keeps everyone close to the cups.
• Explain jargon as you go. "Body means how heavy it feels in your mouth" saves a lot of confused faces.
• Have something to take home: a printed sheet, or a note of which coffees are for sale.
• Think about allergens and hygiene: rinse cups, a spittoon per person and the modified spoon protocol all help.

Group tasting in Coffee Tasting is built for exactly this. The host creates a session and adds up to 12 coffees, keeping each coffee's details hidden as an answer key (naming them "Sample A", "Sample B" makes it fully blind). Up to 20 people join free with a six-character code and record on their own phones. The host sees who has finished each coffee, opens the Characteristic Wall to show what the group tasted, one coffee at a time, and then reveals the key, with matching notes highlighted.