Cupping coffees from around the globe

February 8, 2011 | Posted by Martin

As I was walking toward our production area today, I ran into Matt (VP, Operations) and Giao (QC Assurance) in the cupping lab. They were preparing a cupping for our newest team member, Denise, who joined us as our Online Customer Service Representative. Their goal was to prepare a cupping for Denise to understand general characteristics based on region/continent.

The coffees consisted of coffees from around the world:

Denise did a great job recognizing the nuances between each region and appreciating characteristics like the earthiness in the Sumatra and the fruitiness in the African, and the leathery undertones of the Indian. She was also completely thrown off by the surprise coffee. When asked to describe it, she chose her words very carefully in fear of saying something that would insult Matt or Giao. The surprise coffee was a Robusta that came in last week as part of the dozens of green coffee samples that we randomly get on a weekly basis. (For some reason, exporters/brokers keep sending us samples of Robusta coffees, hoping that we’ll magically fall in love with their coffee. I hope they don’t read this because we use the samples to surprise our new employees and get some entertainment from their reaction.)

Denise did very well in her cupping and her political correctness in describing how “different” that last coffee tasted. Now I’m sure she’ll be very well prepared when she’s inevitably asked “what’s the difference between Arabica and Robusta coffee?”