The Best Way to Learn About Wine Coffee

A touch cheeky, but the point is simple. If you want to get better at tasting coffee and reliably generate actionable conclusions from tasting coffee, you need to taste coffee. There are plenty of promises and distractions vying for your attention, time, and money here. While some of these have some value, they are too easily and too often taken out of context or used as substitutes for actually tasting coffee. The path to tasting coffee and getting better at tasting coffee is, believe it or not, tasting more coffee.

The best way to learn about coffee is in the drinking. So, what if our cupping tools allowed us to focus on learning about coffees, rather than forcing us to learn about the tools? What if cupping didn’t always have to be Cupping? What if cupping followed the same simple and natural process as functional tasting, which many coffee professionals already do every day (“This coffee tastes like X and Y. I’m getting a lot of A and a little B nope actually a little C”)? What if we could hone, focus, and calibrate those tastings? What if those tastings plugged directly into training and team alignment? What if formal tastings were clearly linked with informal, functional ones? What if all of these tastings could be joined, shared, and collaborated on across multiple shots, brews, methods, roasts, cups, shifts, team members, and locations? What if your cupping form could be used in the workflows that you and your team already use?

With the recent flurry of square-peg-round-hole activity in the world of Specialty Coffee Cupping, I’ve found myself engaged in many more “what do you think about cupping?” conversations than usual. I must admit that part of me is thankful to whoever decided to sell cupping so hard that it’s once again a live topic in specialty coffee. As cuppers, we’re accustomed to being tucked neatly away in the back of the building, noses down, spoons up, getting to work without bothering folks or being bothered. Our voices are rarely heard outside of reports, let alone central to industry scuttlebutt.

All of these conversations have really put a point on just how far over the thetan bridge we’ve allowed the wizards of the coast of coffee to lead us. In addition to the important questions of accessibility, ethical compromise, cash-grabulation, and technical validity that are being raised, there is a basic point underpinning these critiques of Cupping in specialty coffee.

I Taste Bad?

Cupping in Specialty Coffee is largely premised on the idea that you cannot taste and that someone else can. Perennially complicated UX, multi-level class and certification structures, white papers that could have been an email, and mounds of technical jargon, for what? Quality = distinctive attributes. Distinctive attributes = whatever you want. A legacy cupping form in need of an update is split and copied into two more complicated and dressed-up versions of the same form, with slightly different scales and formatting, technical-sounding names, and, obviously, new curricula to sell.

The CVA is not innovative or creative. It is merely extra. It is an attempt to leverage the premise of inaccessibility in specialty coffee cupping against you while claiming to improve it and trying to sell accessibility and your ability to taste back to you.

If it seems like we’re being quickly ushered to adopt a complex and cumbersome new cupping protocol – one that we pay fees and lip service to and then ignore – it’s because we are.

You Taste Good.

On the other hand, what if we started from the assumption that we can taste? What if our goal were to refine, deepen, and harness a skill we already possess? What would cupping, tasting, and training look like then? What if we viewed insecurity around tasting as a common hurdle, addressing it through form design, protocol, and approach, rather than using it to sell classes and gatekeep? What if training and practice, cupping and tasting didn’t need to be LARPed like laboratory experiments? What if the cupping form was actually there to enable tasting and accelerate taste processing?

The Coffee Rose is just such a taste enabler, refiner, and accelerator. It’s designed around the understanding that tasting informs description, and description informs tasting. It’s built on the recognition that you’ve been tasting things for your entire life and that you can taste. For most human tasters, the challenges with tasting are that:

1. You may not have developed organizational efficiency from palate to brain and back again.
2. You may have overdeveloped response patterns that actually limit your experience of coffee, even while they speed it up.
3. Input methods don’t follow and can’t keep up with the rate at which you taste and process tasting.

It goes without saying that intentional practice and sound protocols are important to tasting better. It doesn’t go without saying what these really are. You don’t need to mix up a Smuckers solution to know what “grape” tastes like. You also don’t need to buy expensive capsules, dodgy flavorings, essential oils, or any of the other things that so many of us have tried over the years.

This is great news. Working in coffee, we’re surrounded by it. Most of us are drowning in it. Harnessing our existing workflows and bringing intention to the coffees that we’re already tasting is incredibly powerful. Beyond tasting with intention, we want to taste in ways that speak to our use cases and align with our natural approach to tasting and describing coffee.

Easy Peasy

What if your full formal cupping form were also easy enough to use for less formal and impromptu (functional) tastings? What if the recorded cupping information wasn’t just limited to formal Cupping, but also included roast tests, daily brews, and things like dialing in? Three major things stand out:

1. Every informal/functional use would make you and your team more practical and responsive in formal cupping.
2. Each formal use would make you and your team more precise and accurate in functional tastings.
3. The depth and applicability of your coffee-tasting information would explode.
   1. Your roasting team would see not only how their roast adjustments tasted to themselves, but also how they performed in context on bar.
   2. Your front-of-house would see not only how a coffee was tasting, but also how the roaster intended it to taste.
   3. All of these would tie directly back to your QC team’s cuppings. You would begin to document which cupping profile components persist, appear, grow, or recede from QC to roast to service, and under what conditions.

Knowledge and taste are both contextual. Context limits each, but it also provides both with a novel point of view and an opportunity for insight. Cupping and tasting forms are meant to help you taste things. They’re meant to make it easier, to open, focus, and deepen the experience. They’re meant to make these points of view and opportunities for insight more accessible.

Of course… you have to use them to unlock these benefits. In turn, they must be usable in order for people to… actually use them. It’s a two-way street. Cupping forms should be designed to 1) fit the ways that we taste and 2) respect that the form is meant to enable and support the tasting experience. This is what the Coffee Rose was designed to do, and what it does for us every day.

You’re not on the outside of tasting, looking in. Don’t let someone else hold your ability to taste hostage. “Not being able to taste” is rarely the issue. Usually, the issues people have with tasting and cupping are 1) recognizing and organizing their experience, and 2) generating actionable conclusions efficiently. That’s it.

Just taste more coffee, more often, more intentionally, and ideally with a protocol that supports your experience and allows you to express what coffees taste like. You and your team will get better at tasting and communicating coffee day by day, while others spin their wheels with gimmicks and dead ends. For all the studies and papers and classes explaining how various forms and protocols are aimed at unlocking coffee value, it’s wild the degree to which they just plainly do a terrible job of actually telling me what coffees taste like.

Where Coffee Gets Made

We use the Coffee Rose for formal cupping, but formal cupping doesn’t define or limit it. The Coffee Rose was developed around a group of techniques known as rapid sensory profiling (RSP). RSP methods were developed specifically as less costly (time, training, money) alternatives to traditional descriptive analysis.

This means that in formal settings, we can obtain high-detail results very quickly and with minimal palate fatigue. It means that coffees aren’t stone cold when we discuss, which means that we can still reference them, which empowers our discussions and calibration. It also means that in less formal settings, we can pull out the Rose and get super robust assessments without all the fuss of setting up a formal cupping.

This is a result of its roots in rapid sensory profiling and its novel application of the check all that apply (CATA) technique. While it’s important to note that a short learning curve is still a learning curve, the Coffee Rose, in addition to aligning itself with the way we experience and describe coffee, was designed from the observation that people like you and me can actually taste. I don’t have any secret knowledge to bestow, and the Coffee Rose doesn’t magically make you a Sensory Scientist.

New tasters often just need a path to connect their experience to language that expresses it. Experienced tasters benefit from considering options outside of their habitual descriptive patterns. The Coffee Rose CATA was specifically designed to offer both of these in a package that can be used in real time to easily describe coffees of all qualities, across all roast styles and brewing techniques.

The “best way to learn about coffee” approach of the Coffee Rose presents an alternative to the idea that cupping, even “serious” cupping, has to be complicated, cumbersome, or exclusionary. It presents an alternative to the idea that convoluted formal cupping procedures somehow define or trump practical tasting. Coffee people make, drink, taste, and talk about coffees, roasts, blends, and brews every day. They take action based on what they taste. Whether it’s making a purchase, adjusting a grind size, a blend ratio, or a development time, these are critical actions that, for many people, occur in less formal tasting environments than the cupping room. The Coffee Rose fits into those environments. Rather than being limited by a formal format that most people rarely actually use, and which accounts for only a fraction of their functional tasting, the Coffee Rose was created to connect and empower coffee tasters in the ways and places where tasting really occurs.

The Coffee Rose was made for the places where coffee gets made.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Coffee Rose, join our upcoming live walkthrough, led by Ian Fretheim (Director of Sensory Analysis).

It will be hosted on Microsoft Teams on July 24 at 3:00 PM CT.

New to the Rose?

Here are some links to help get you up and running.

Create Account | Getting Started | How it was Developed