With numerous high-quality coffee beans worldwide, each region has its distinctive coffee cultivar depending on its conditions – environmentally, such as soil and humidity, and even culturally depending on the people's customs. 

It’s said that there are only about 4000 Q-graders in the world, and only 30% of the exam takers pass. Thus, we can conclude that the Q-grader certification is a serious uptaking, and once obtained, means that you really know coffee.

So what makes this certification prestigious and how do you pass the exams?

Coffee cupping has been around in the coffee industry for quite a long time and you might wonder how it was started and who initiated the system. So, in this blog, we will take you to a history of coffee cupping lesson – we’re sure that it’ll be far from boring!

The history of coffee cupping as a standardized system to check coffee consistency has been around since the late 19th century. It was initially used for buying decisions in auctions for merchants. Up until that time, there was no established standardization system for coffee. The term ‘cup testing’ was only used for visual assessment of the coffee –the coffee was priced solely based on the size and color of the green beans. 

Processing: of all the stages that coffee goes through in its journey from seed to cup, it’s processing that plays the most important role in determining unique flavor profiles. Of course, this isn’t to say that roasting and brewing don’t significantly impact flavor (because they do). Rather, processing develops the flavor profile that roasting and brewing accentuates and refines. Whether a coffee tastes like white peach and almond extract isn’t going to be a result of manipulating roast profile; i.e, you can’t “roast-in” flavor notes (with the exception of “ashiness” and “burnt” notes as a result of too dark a roast). A smart roaster would be keen to accent the peach note through careful roasting, but the fact that it tastes like peaches at all—well that’s down to the processing.

Did you know that coffee cupping and coffee tasting are different?

Even though the practice is kind of similar –to evaluate the cup quality–, coffee cupping and coffee tasting actually serve different purposes, consist of different evaluation times and even different procedures. If you can actually master both “techniques”, it will give you a better picture on how your coffee is produced from the origin to the final cup, thus you can understand your cup quality and coffee better – on how it’s roasted and brewed. Regardless of whether you want to assess the green beans quality, how a coffee is roasted and how it tastes as a cup of brewed coffee, both cupping and tasting should be included in your skillset. Rather than being a ‘versus,’ they are actually complementary protocols to serve better coffee and cup quality. 

So, what’s coffee cupping?