If you are trying to find the best cup of Joe around, then you need to put some effort into your tasting, often called cupping. Anyone and everyone can embark on coffee cupping, but it’s helpful to have the right supplies on hand to set yourself up for success!
If you have ever tasted a delicious cup of Joe, only to forget exactly what it was weeks later, then it is to your advantage to begin to sample different varieties in coffee cupping. This will allow you to journal your coffee drinking experiences, and you can even create a scrapbook if you are so inclined. A small journal will be perfect because you can bring it with you wherever you are, such as in a backpack or purse. This will help you to immediately jot down your impressions of the coffee to make sure that you remember exactly what you experienced in flavor and characteristics. You can take these notes and then later store them into your computer if you want them saved for your records.
From there, it is best to determine what type of information you will jot down when you are sampling or cupping the coffee. Some people take a very simple approach and just give it a rating of 1 through 10 or a number of stars, while others write down flavor descriptions, impressions, and how it might pair with a type of cuisine. You can also use your phone to take pictures of the coffee or coffee beans to better imprint them in your memory. This will work well with physical or online scrapbooks so that you can organize your information and pair it with pictures.
From they are, make sure to organize all of your information based on the different types of coffee beans. If you are sampling a number of different coffees, then you can divide your journal into sections based on the regions that the coffee beans were grown in. You can also divide differently based on light to dark roasts, depending on how you would like to categorize and characterize your brews.
As an example, you can jot down in your journal the date, what type of coffee roast you are drinking, where it is from, when it was produced, how it was produced, the producer, the grade of the bean, the aroma, the taste, the body, the brew method, and notes on serving or pairing. This is your opportunity to be creative because there is no set way to take personal notes in a coffee cupping. However, it is important to be quite detailed if you want to begin to grow in your knowledge of Java and start to compare and contrast all of the flavor profiles that are available out there.
As a tip, it is often a great idea to start out with lighter roasts because they offer more clarity in their flavor characteristics compared to darker roasts, which regularly have smoky or charcoal flavors. And the rest is up to you in your expert coffee cupping… cup for iced coffee