Notes Between Cups, Volume 3

I’ve been thinking a lot about objectivity, subjectivity, perception, and bias at the cupping table recently. You’ve probably thought about this, too. An arrival doesn’t match our memory of the offer sample. Somone’s opinion (never mine!) about a coffee’s value changes from one day to the next (or, to reframe, maybe the same coffee tastes great on one table and awful on the next). What’s going on here? 

This week, at our production cupping for the Tasting Room, a number of coffees surprised us. Our production cuppings at The Crown use a specific format: we quality control the most recent roast of a coffee by tasting it against the most recently approved roast of the same coffee, usually a week apart. The cupping is frequently only semi-blind at best… the participants know more or less which coffees are in play for espresso, pour-over, and cold brew any given week. It’s not a strong format from a sensory science perspective, but it does help us quickly decide if a coffee is fit for service. 

Our washed Bolivian coffee was sleek and mellow and sweet, a bit of a change from the basil-like herbal notes and baking spice and tart cranberry we’ve experienced in the past weeks. And the honey process Burundi was brighter, punchier, and more savory than any of us remembered, really standing out on the table as something extraordinary. 

The thing is, in both cases, the new roast closely matched the reference samples. Despite similar perceptions in our group of cuppers, the coffees hadn’t actually changed from week to week. My strong suspicion is that context on the table played a major role—a coffee’s neighbors often influence its flavor as we proceed through the cups. There are likely other factors at play here, too. 

The senses of taste and smell are so integral to our experience in specialty coffee, and so fickle. Isabella’s been doing some literature review and background research for some upcoming projects we’re hoping to formulate into published work and hands-on experiments, and the degree to which humans are both sensitive to sensory stimuli, and simultaneously affected by outside forces competing for our attention—both consciously and subconsciously—is mind blowing. 

A couple of interesting nuggets from her research: 

• I’d always been taught our sense of smell is less sensitive than many animals. For example, a dog has 2 billion olfactory bulb neurons compared to a human’s 10-20 million. However, we have, on average, more functional receptor genes, meaning our ability to process the information might be more powerful… interesting if true. 

• We have an extraordinary ability to discriminate between odors, on the order of over a trillion potential aroma compounds. 

• Olfaction and emotions are highly influential on each other, and it’s a two-way street. Our sense of smell can alter emotions (i.e., smelling something warm and sweet can be calming), and emotions can alter our sensitivity to stimuli (if you’re in a good mood, you’re more sensitive to sweet and less sensitive to sour flavors). 

In March, I had the privilege to travel to Yunnan and join an academic symposium and exchange between professors at UC Davis and a consortium of intellectuals and industry participants working in coffee in China. Among the friends I made were two married professors, Julien and Gaelle Delarue, who I invited later to join me at The Crown to introduce them to the practice of cupping. 

They were aghast and awestruck. What horrifically unscientific practice, to have all tasters experience the same table, in the same order! What a miraculously ritualistic practice to experience a wide spectrum of coffee flavors at once. They had no trouble identifying the good from the bad and expressing opinions as well as offering descriptive analysis… just like we do… just like we’re told not to do by the newly implemented SCA Coffee Value Assessment. 

Dunking on the SCA and the CVA is in vogue and easy. I’m not necessarily trying to make the case here that the new Q is irrelevant. I think it has beneficial applications. But, I digress.  

I asked Julien if other industries had such idiosyncratic taste evaluation practices. He shook his head. 

I also found it interesting that Gaelle’s research into smallholder farmer support in bringing new products to market used a form surprisingly similar to the CVA’s affective evaluation—except that it was not the farmers using it, but a survey of customers, expressing preference and helping to shape (a) what product might perform well and (b) to actually describe and create info sheets for the products. My colleague Ian Fretheim has noted similarly the customer/non-expert facing nature of the CVA’s affective form and questioned its legitimacy in practice for coffee professional decision-making.  

I also see another angle here. I mentioned to Gaelle the practice of coffee professionals describing their products: three descriptive words on their roasted bean packages (frequently unaccompanied by clarifying phrases such as “tastes like”) and our tendency to try to guide customer preference and perception. 

Her research and work focuses on the opposite approach—consumer and demand-focused flavor descriptors and assessment helping to shape the way producers talk about and sell their products. Could we as roasters be more engaged with our customer base for specialty products? Would a survey of flavor notes from non-experts help us place our coffees better into hands that would appreciate their flavors? 

I know the experience of hearing tasting notes and finding an experiential disconnect between what we actually taste in the cup is a common one. I wonder if we could make it less common by rethinking our approach to gathering descriptive notes and perhaps reassessing our ideas of perception and bias. 

Which leads me to wonder… what’s a perfect coffee evaluation platform for professionals look like? How can we marry good sensory science practices with efficient decision-making strategies. These are questions I’m hoping to begin exploring possible answers to. 

What do you find helpful in your daily tasting practices, whether for making purchasing decisions or describing coffees to customers?