The words for what is in the cup
You cannot fix what you cannot name.
The first two chapters gave you a bean and a brew. This one gives you the language — because "nice" and "not nice" are not opinions a roaster, a barista or your own next brew can do anything with. A cupping sheet is a structure that forces you to taste one thing at a time.
What cupping actually is
Cupping is tasting a coffee independently of how it is brewed. Ground coffee, hot water, no filter, no recipe, no barista skill to hide behind — everyone in the room drinks the same thing, prepared the same way, so the only variable left is the coffee itself. It is how buyers choose lots, how roasters check a batch, and how a room of people discovers they disagree about what they just drank.
You taste it blind, and you score before you talk. Both of those are there for the same reason: as soon as you know it is the expensive Ethiopian, you have already decided what you think of it.
The other two panels work fine on a train. This one is an instrument, and an instrument with nothing to measure is a toy. Brew two coffees you expect to differ — a supermarket blend and something from a roaster, say — pour them side by side, and score them in the same sitting. Everyone in the room can open this page on their own phone.
Two scores, not one
Here is the part that separates a tasting sheet from a rating out of five. Every attribute gets scored twice: once for quantity — how much of it is there — and once for quality — was it any good.
Beginners collapse those two into one number, and lose the most useful observation they made. A coffee can have a great deal of acidity that is bad acidity: sharp, flat, aggressive. On a single scale that comes out as a five out of ten, which is indistinguishable from a cup that was merely dull. With two dials you can write down what you actually tasted — lots of it, and none of it good.
That distinction is why the panel below puts the two sliders in the same card and reads the pair back as a phrase rather than a number.
The five attributes
In the order you meet them: you smell it, you slurp it, and then you wait.
| Attribute | Where you find it | What "good" means |
|---|---|---|
| Aroma | Before the first sip — break the crust and smell the steam | Intense, clean and specific. Most of what you will call flavour arrives here |
| Acidity | The sides of the tongue, immediately | Bright, juicy, structural. Its failure mode is sour, not "too much" |
| Sweetness | The middle of the cup, filling it out | Not sugar — there is none. A roundness some coffees simply have and others do not |
| Body | Weight and texture, independent of flavour | Light and tea-like or rich and chewy. Neither is better; both can be done badly |
| Finish | After you swallow — give it 30 s to a minute | Long, clean and sweet. A bad one dries the mouth, or simply is not there |
Sour is not bitter
Almost everyone new to this uses the two words interchangeably, and they are not remotely the same sensation. Sour is an acid — it hits fast, at the sides of the tongue, and makes you salivate. Bitter is an alkaloid — it is slow, it sits at the back, and it lingers after you swallow. The course has a four-food test for it, and it works better than any definition:
| Gentle | Unmistakable | |
|---|---|---|
| Sour | Apple | Lemon |
| Bitter | Cucumber | Dark chocolate |
Eat all four and pay attention to where and when each one happens. Then go back to the extraction chapter: under-extraction gives you the lemon, over-extraction gives you the chocolate without the sweetness. Knowing which of the two is in front of you is the whole difference between grinding finer and grinding coarser.
Cupping sheet
Score each attribute twice — how much of it, and how good it was. Add a second cup and the comparison appears underneath. Your scores are kept in this browser, so a mid-session refresh does not lose them.
Nothing here is calculated. The sheet records what you tasted; the only score is the one you set.
Five things to try
- Score the same coffee twice. Fill in one cup, add a second, and score the same brew again without looking back. The gap between the two is your own noise floor — everything smaller than it is not a real difference between coffees.
- Find the bad acidity. Push acidity's quantity up and its quality down, and watch the phrase under the attribute change. That combination is the one a single star rating cannot express, and the one you will meet most often in a badly brewed cup.
- Taste blind, name last. Leave the name field empty until you have finished scoring. Then fill it in. If you find yourself wanting to adjust a slider afterwards, you have just learned something about yourself rather than about the coffee.
- Compare quality, not quantity. With two cups scored, switch the comparison to Quality. Cups that looked similar on quantity often separate completely here — the same amount of body, one of it pleasant and one of it muddy.
- Read yours out loud. Copy the sheet and paste it into whatever the group is using. The point of a room full of people cupping is to discover you were the only one who tasted blueberry — and then to go back and check whether it was there.
Where the words come from
The chips in the panel are a trimmed flavour wheel: nine families, about sixty words. The full SCA wheel runs to roughly a hundred and ten, arranged from broad families in the middle out to specifics at the rim, and the way you are meant to use it is inward-out — fruity first, then berry, then blueberry, only as far as you can honestly defend.
A word you cannot defend is worse than no word. "Fruity" that you mean beats "raspberry" that you guessed, because the second one sends the next person looking for something that was never there.
Roasted coffee contains somewhere around 900 volatile aroma compounds — roughly twice as many as wine. That is the reason the vocabulary is this big, and also the reason nobody is fluent in it. You are not learning to identify nine hundred things. You are learning to reliably notice a dozen, and to stop calling the rest "nice".
The other two chapters compute something. This one deliberately does not. There is no algorithm that turns five pairs of sliders into "your coffee is a 7.4", and building one would quietly replace the thing being taught — your own attention — with a number. The only score on the sheet is the one you set yourself, and the phrases under each attribute are restating your sliders, not judging them.
Which is the end of the course, and the beginning of the useful part. Three chapters in, the question has moved from "is this good coffee" to something you can actually act on: what is in this cup, how much of it was decided on the farm, and how much of it did I do to myself this morning?