Today we're gonna talk about how to set up a coffee cupping at home.

Now a coffee cupping is a specific sort of coffee tasting used really commonly in the coffee industry at all sections of the Value chain.

It really refers to a specific way of brewing as well as tasting on.

We're not going to try and replicate all of it.

We're gonna cherry pick the best bits so that we can put on a really simple cupping and do comparative tasting.

And that's really the key.

The key to developing your sense of taste is to taste different coffees side by side, and this is the easiest way to do that.

The coffee industry uses capping in a host of different ways.

A buyer will cup coffee is that origin when looking for different lots, that they might want to purchase an importer makeup coffees to make sure that what arrived matches the pre ship sample a roaster makeup coffees, as part of their quality control process to make sure that they're roasting, has been up to scratch on a cafe makeup coffees to decide which coffees they want to put on that menu now As I said, there are a turn of protocols and rituals around a cupping in the industry.

We don't need to replicate off those.

We're gonna take the most important bits to get to a nice comparative cupping.

So in this video, I'll walk you through what you need in terms of equipment, and I think you'll have most of it at home already.

I'll walk you through the brewing process how we're gonna brew coffee in a cup ing, and then I'll walk you through the basic steps off how to cup several coffees side by side.

This is gonna be a two part video.

This is really the practicalities of setting up a coffee tasting at home what you need and how to do it.

The second part is gonna be about taste itself.

Acidity, sweetness, exploring most things, diving in in much more detail.

But this one, this part is just the practicalities of getting set up.

So the first thing you're gonna need is a cattle.

Doesn't matter whether it's expensive cattle, cheap cattle.

It doesn't have to be a goose neck.

Cattle, just a regular domestic cattle is completely fine.

Make sure you fill this with fresh cold water that's nice and soft and is good tasting.

That's important, too.

Next thing you're gonna need is a weighing scale, and you want to be weighing both coffee and water with it.

So something accurate, too 0.1 of the Graham is ideal, and then you're gonna need a coffee grinder.

Now, in an ideal world, you want a grinder that's designed to grind through everything that you put in it that doesn't really retain any coffee.

If you have a grinder that does retain coffee and you gotta hand grinder in this situation a hand ground, it might be better.

And then you need some sort of spoons.

Now it can be something like a coffee cupping spoon.

These are designed for coffee cupping, but that's not actually that necessary.

It's perfectly good to just use a dessert spoon or a soup spoon, and if you want to, you could do something really fancy.

But that's not a requirement.

You just need something of this kind of size, and you need a few of them, and then we need something to brew in.

The industry uses these.

They're called cupping balls.

It's nothing specialist, nothing fancy.

It's basically a sugar bowl.

It's a bowl of about 250 mils and volume, and that's it.

You don't need to use something like this, but if you've got a bunch of these or something like it, then that's great.

But you can use, Ah, he proof glass if you want to.

Lots of people like to use that, but if you have neither of those things, then you can brew in just a regular mug.

That's fine in it could even be a pretty big mug, but you'll have to make some changes and adapt your recipe a little bit as you go.

But all you need is ideally five or six of roughly the same size things and to know how big they are.

And then the last thing you need, it's, um, coffee now have to be clear here.

What you don't have to do is this.

You don't have to go and buy three full bags for 564 bags of different coffees.

You can get away with getting hold of, say, 20 grams of one particular coffee, and that's enough for you to come up with it now.

The ideal number I would say you're starting out is maybe four or five.

I wouldn't try to get hold of 10 different samples if you're just getting used to kind of cupping coffee side by side.

Three is enough to is enough actually to have some interesting learning.

But I think four or five is really the best that just do what you need to do to get four or five little samples of coffee to taste.

Go and talk to your local coffee shop.

A lot of them are pretty interested in talking to you if you're enthusiastic about tasting coffee and you only want a few grams to do it with.

If you've got friends that by good coffee trade with them, there's loads of different ways to do it.

But all you need is a little bit of a few different things.

That's really the key.

Oh, s.

So let's talk about how you're gonna brew coffee for your coffee cupping on.

If you've seen my French press technique video, a lot of this is gonna be very, very, very familiar.

Now there's two ideas behind the way that we brew coffee and a cupping one.

It's the way to brew coffee that has the least human interaction, right?

What we don't want to do is brew coffee in a way where our technique can impact taste.

Pour over is a great, but how you brought pour over can make it sweeter or more acidic.

So at what point are you tasting the pore over and at what point you tasting the coffee?

The other big idea behind this whole thing is scalability To brew.

Five pour overs would not only be time consuming, it would be really annoying, let alone trying to do 10 or 20.

This is a way that we can brew several coffees at the same time, and it's really, really, really easy.

So what's the method?

Well, it it couldn't be simpler.

We're gonna grind some coffee kind of in the finer end of medium Fine.

We're gonna pull some hot water on it and let it steep for about four minutes, just like a French press.

Then they'll be a crust that forms on the top and was stir it after four minutes.

Clean off, and if it's left floating and then we have a bowl of coffee or a mug of coffee or a glass of coffee ready to taste.

So the key things here are recipe and ratio.

Now I'm going to recommend a ratio of 60 grams per liter now, usually for infusion brewed like this, I would recommend 75 grams a liter.

But here, brewing a little weaker, actually makes the tasting process a little bit easier.

And then he got recipe, right?

So if you've got, say, a 242 150 mil bowl, you don't want to use 242 150 miles of water.

You want to use 200 and that would be 12 grams of coffee.

When you brew that 12 grams of coffee it'll bloom, the phone will appear on, it will swell up in size.

What?

That volume is typically three times to four times the weight of the coffee.

A little vary a little bit so that 12 grams will easily take up 40 mills.

Plus, the 200 equals a very full bowl in a 240 mobile.

If you don't have five or six cups or balls that are the same size and shape, that's okay.

You can use a whole bunch of different sizes.

If you want to, you got two choices.

Either pick the smallest size this case 10 grams to 1 60 do that in all the vessels, or you could scale up and down.

This is pretty much twice the size, so I do 20 grams to about 330 grams of water.

The choice is yours.

Whatever's easier for you now.

When it comes time to weigh beans, weigh them into the vessel you're gonna be brewing in later.

It's just an easy way to keep them organized.

As you prep up, I would say you want to be accurate to ideally your target weight, give or take 0.1 of a gram.

So if I want 12 grams in here, it's 11.9 to 12.1 is my kind of window.

Once you grind them, weigh them again because you might have lost a liberal comfort of that grinder.

In addition, before you grind your main tasting sample of a particular coffee, grind through just a little handful of beans just to make sure that there's nothing left from a previous coffee and that grinder once that's done once you've weighed out all your beans.

Hide the bags.

What you don't want is kind of prompt or taste notes lying around, influencing you when you taste, So make a note of what's what.

Get rid of them.

For the sake of this tasting, I'm going to set up three different coffees in three very different vessels.

I'm gonna need a couple of spare empty vessels that I'll use for rinsing and cleaning, and I'll be good to go.

So right now, I'm gonna prep my three samples and then I'm gonna boil a kettle on.

When I come back, we'll start the testing process.

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The water is bored and we are ready to go now.

If you go to an industry tasting, you'll notice that people are often already taking notes on things like the smell of the dry grounds.

There are gonna be opportunities to smell the coffee before we taste it, and that's interesting.

But if you're new to coffee tasting, this isn't a test.

If it's if it's fun, that's good.

If it's interesting, that's good.

But you don't have to take copious notes.

You don't have to find dozens of words to describe things.

Don't worry about it.

Let's get into brewing.

Now I'm gonna brew on scales because I'm brewing three different recipes here.

I've got 12 grams, 15 and 20 on.

I'll need to brood the right waits accordingly.

On dhe, it's really hard.

Tu brute consistently without scales, even in the same bowls with same weight of coffee, some coffees bloom or than others.

So zero it out.

And your hot water lovely.

These are a little bit hoped.

This is now perfect.

Time to use the mostly useless digital assistant in your pocket.

In your phone.

Set a timer for four minutes.

Okay.

Your timer is set for four minutes.

At the end of four minutes, we're gonna get a spirit.

I'm going to use it to stop the brewing process.

We're gonna gently stir the crust on top three times and that's gonna cause much the grounds to sink to the bottom.

You, then getting it a second spoon to scrape off anything on the top that still floating, leaving a clean bowl, ready to taste.

Now again in the industry, you'll notice people smelling really intently when they're stirring that crust.

It's an interesting aroma release moment, but if you're new to coffee tasting, don't worry about it too much.

It's fun, and it's interesting, but but don't obsess over these kind of details.

The coffee industry has a bunch of other priorities around a tasting than we do at home.

So now these are nearly ready to taste.

They're just a little bit too hot.

I would recommend waiting at least 10 more minutes to let them cool down.

Right now, they're not only so hot that they burn your tongue, but they're almost impossible to taste when they're that hot tasting gets easier.

The cooler coffee gets used this time to get rid of that, rinse water, clean up the space and get ready to cup.

Don't grab that notebook.

Drink a glass of water on, get ready.

And so now, finally, it's time to taste.

So the spoon the spoon is there so that we can just have a little sample of coffee and not have to pick up a mug of hot liquid.

That's it.

It lets us do one more thing, which is slipped the coffee.

Now you'll see coffee professionals make an astonishing array of bizarre noises as they slept.

This is mostly to cover our insecurities and make us look like we know what we're doing.

Really, you need a little sample of liquid, and just generally you're really just trying to gently spray the coffee into your mouth.

It's just kind of turning up the volume on the flavors that you're tasting.

Give you a spoon or a little rinse between bowls and keep tasting.

Compare and contrast.

That's the game here.

Make sure you keep tasting from hot all the way down to kind of room temperature.

The coffees.

They're gonna change so much in that time, and they'll just get easier and easier to taste.

So, like I said in a couple of weeks, they'll be another part of this, which is much more focused on exploring a sense of taste through coffee.

This is really just about the practical process of setting up and doing a coffee.

Cupping at home on What I want you to do is to go and try doing this.