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Coffee Cupping: The Professional Tasting Method

Tasters cupping coffee side by side at a long bench.

Ethiopian coffee tasters at a Coffee Corps Advanced Cuppers Training Seminar, 20 August 2003. Photo: G. LaRue (USAID) / Wikimedia Commons, public domain, cropped.

Cupping is the method the coffee trade uses to smell, taste, describe and score coffee under fixed conditions. Every cup is prepared the same way, so that the differences a taster finds come from the coffee and not from the brewing. The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) publishes the standard method. On 4 November 2024 it adopted a new system, the Coffee Value Assessment, which supersedes the cupping protocol and 100-point form of 2004. The sections below explain how a cupping is done, how the new system works, what the older form measured, and what a score can and cannot tell a buyer or a farmer. For tasting coffee at home, see Cupping Coffee at Home: Equipment, Method and Building a Palate.

How a Cupping Works

Two cuppers in white coats scoring a round table of cupping bowls beside trays of green coffee beans, recording results on paper forms.

Cupping to certify the Café de Valdesia denomination of origin, Raúl H. Melo laboratory of CODOCAFE, Dominican Republic, 2008. Photo: Rpdecamps / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Each cup gets its own measured dose of ground coffee, and each coffee is tasted in several cups. The taster first smells the dry grounds. Hot water is poured straight onto the grounds, and the grounds rise to form a crust. After a few minutes the taster smells the crust, breaks it with a spoon, and skims the grounds away. When the coffee has cooled, the taster slurps it from a spoon so that it covers as much of the mouth as possible, especially the tongue and the upper palate. Each cup of the same coffee is tasted, so that the taster can tell whether they all taste alike.

The Protocol

These are the preparation rules of SCA Standard 102-2024, the part of the Coffee Value Assessment that covers sample preparation and tasting:

  • Coffee and water: 8.25 grams of coffee for every 150 millilitres of cup capacity, weighed to within 0.2 grams.
  • Cups: between 200 and 350 millilitres.
  • Roast: medium, with a target reading of 63 on the Agtron "Gourmet" scale.
  • Rest: 8 to 24 hours after roasting.
  • Grind: 70 to 75 percent of the grounds pass a US standard 20-mesh sieve (850-micrometre openings), slightly coarser than for paper-filter brewing.
  • Water: 93 °C, give or take 3 °C (about 194 to 205 °F).
  • Crust: left unbroken for 3 to 5 minutes.
  • Tasting: begins when the coffee has cooled to about 70 °C (158 °F).
  • Cups per coffee: five for the affective assessment, and three to five for the descriptive assessment.

In a 200-millilitre cup, the ratio works out to 11 grams of coffee, or 55 grams per litre. The earlier SCAA protocol gave the same figures, 8.25 grams per 150 millilitres of water, and tied them to the middle of the Golden Cup brewing recommendations. Five cups let the taster see whether all the cups of one coffee taste alike. A cup that tastes different from the others is recorded as non-uniform, and a cup with a taste defect is recorded as defective.

The video below, published in 2018, shows a cupping scored on the earlier SCA form.

Watch: Cupping coffee with the SCA form — Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters

The Coffee Value Assessment

The SCA announced on 4 November 2024 that it had adopted three parts of the Coffee Value Assessment as its official cupping standards. They are SCA Standard 102 on sample preparation, SCA Standard 103 on the descriptive assessment, and SCA Standard 104 on the affective assessment. The SCA Standards Development Panel approved them, after a preliminary release in June 2024. The SCA first showed a beta version of the system at the Re:co Symposium in Portland, Oregon, on 20 April 2023. A fourth standard, SCA Standard 105-2025 on the extrinsic assessment, describes itself as provisional.

The SCA describes the system as four complementary assessments rather than one score:

  • Physical: the green coffee's colour, defects, moisture and bean size, recorded from a 350-gram sample.
  • Descriptive: what the coffee smells and tastes like, in standard words, without judging whether it is good.
  • Affective: how highly the taster rates each part of the coffee, by personal preference or by the preference of a known market.
  • Extrinsic: information from outside the cup, such as farming, processing, trading and certification details.

A taster may carry out one of these assessments or all four. The SCA says the physical assessment is based on its 2004 green coffee grading system. It lists a separate standard for grading green coffee for trade, SCA-110, as still in development.

The Descriptive Assessment

The descriptive form has three sections with word lists: fragrance and aroma, flavour and aftertaste, and mouthfeel. The taster rates the total intensity of each part of the cupping on a 15-point scale. The taster then ticks the words that best describe the coffee, choosing up to five for fragrance and aroma. The taster also records up to two main tastes, such as sweet, sour or bitter. The SCA states that intensity does not imply quality or desirability, so a stronger coffee is not, for that reason, a better one.

The Affective Assessment and Its Score

The affective form has eight sections, from fragrance to overall. Each is marked on a 9-point scale, from 1 for an extremely low impression of quality to 9 for an extremely high one, with 5 as neutral. The eight marks are added, giving a total between 8 and 72. The SCA's conversion table turns that total into a cupping score between 58 and 100. A total of 40, with every section at the neutral 5, gives 79 points. A total of 72, with every section at 9, gives 100 points. Two points are then taken off for each non-uniform cup and four for each defective cup, and the score is rounded to the nearest quarter point. A defective cup is also marked non-uniform, unless the defect is spread evenly across every cup. The SCA publishes an online calculator for this score. SCA Standard 104 defines the cupping score as one taster's overall impression of a coffee's quality.

The 2004 Form

The cupping protocol that the Coffee Value Assessment replaced was published by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). The SCA calls it the 2004 Cupping Protocol and Form; the copy consulted is the SCAA's revision of 16 December 2015. The form recorded fragrance and aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, clean cup, sweetness and overall, and took off points for defects. Uniformity, clean cup and sweetness earned 2 points for each of the five cups that showed them, up to 10 points. The other attributes were marked in quarter points between 6 (good) and 9 (outstanding), with 7 for very good and 8 for excellent; in theory the scale ran from 0 to 10. The total placed the coffee in a class:

  • 90 to 100: outstanding.
  • 85 to 89.99: excellent.
  • 80 to 84.99: very good.
  • Below 80: not specialty quality.

The three classes from 80 upwards were all specialty. The SCA now calls the 2004 protocol a Heritage standard, superseded by Standards 102, 103 and 104. Trade writers have questioned how quickly buyers will move from the 2004 form to the new system.

Specialty Grade

Under the earlier SCAA system, specialty grade required two things: a cupping score of 80 or more, and a pass in green grading. Green grading counts defects in a 350-gram sample of green coffee. A specialty-grade sample could have no Category 1 defects and no more than five Category 2 defects. Its colour had to be blue-green, bluish-green or green, and it had to be free of foreign odours. Some trade publications give the sample as 300 grams; the SCAA protocol and the SCA's physical-assessment form both use 350 grams. The SCAA grading protocol states that its system defines only two grades, Specialty Grade and Premium Grade, so Premium is a grade of green coffee, not a band of cupping scores.

Scores and Prices

Prices for green specialty coffee vary with cup score, lot size and origin. The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, created by researchers at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, reports the prices actually paid for green specialty coffee on those three measures. Its 2024 edition drew on more than 100,000 contracts supplied by cooperatives, exporters, importers and roasters. For the 2021/22 to 2023/24 harvests, it found a median free-on-board (FOB) price of $2.93 a pound for "regular" specialty coffees scored 80 to 83.9, and $4.18 a pound for "fancy" coffees scored 84 or more. The guide is free to download, and its website is in English and Spanish. Producers and exporters use it as a reference other than the New York "C" futures price when they begin talks about price. Perfect Daily Grind reported in November 2024 that many specialty roasters had begun buying more coffees scoring 84 points or more, although coffees scoring 80 to 83 remain specialty grade. In the same report, Ian Fretheim, director of sensory analysis, said that one point is within the margin of error for most cuppers. In January 2026 the same publication reported that sharp rises in market prices can weaken the reward for quality, because producers can earn strong returns from ordinary coffee and some buyers lower their quality expectations.

Q Graders

A Q Grader is a coffee taster licensed after passing a course and a series of practical assessments. The Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) introduced the Q Coffee System, including the Q Grader certificate, in 2004. CQI states that by 2024 its network had reached ten thousand Q Graders. Under a partnership announced in April 2025, the SCA has run an updated Q Grader programme based on the Coffee Value Assessment since 1 October 2025, and CQI no longer takes part in running it. The SCA awards the licence to people who complete its six-day Q Grader course and pass nine assessments: eight practical evaluations and one written exam. The practical assessments it names include physical assessment, olfactory category examples, descriptive assessment, triangulation, roasting problems, main-taste solutions and affective assessment. The licence is valid for three years and is renewed through continued professional development; the full course does not have to be taken again. When CQI ran the programme, certificates were valid for 36 months.

Cupping Puerto Rican Coffee

The SCA cupping standards apply to green arabica coffee and set no separate rules for any country of origin. Puerto Rican coffee is therefore cupped by the same protocol as coffee from anywhere else. Because a cupping score is one taster's impression of one coffee, a score quoted for Puerto Rican coffee is meaningful only when the coffee, the taster and the protocol are named. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence's published competition results, from 1999 to 2026, list no Cup of Excellence competition held in Puerto Rico.

Free Tools for Producers and Tasters

The SCA's Coffee Value Assessment forms can be downloaded from its website in seven languages, including Spanish and English. They may be copied and shared, provided they are not changed. The SCA's video series on the thinking behind the system is available in six languages, including Spanish and English. The SCA's Coffee Value Assessment page lists Standards 102 to 105 as open-access documents. World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon, created at the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University, identifies 110 flavour, aroma and texture attributes found in coffee and gives references for measuring their intensity. It is free to download and print for personal use, and its second edition was published in October 2017. The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel was first published in 1995 and updated in 2016 in collaboration with World Coffee Research, with the Lexicon as its foundation. The SCA sells the wheel as a poster and as a digital file. The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, described above, shows what buyers have paid for coffees by cup score.

Key Facts

  • Cupping prepares every cup the same way, so that differences come from the coffee.
  • Since 4 November 2024, the SCA's official cupping standards are Standards 102, 103 and 104 of the Coffee Value Assessment.
  • The protocol uses 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 millilitres of cup capacity, water at 93 °C, and five cups per coffee for the affective assessment.
  • The crust is left unbroken for 3 to 5 minutes, and tasting begins at about 70 °C.
  • Affective marks run from 1 to 9 in eight sections, and the SCA's table converts their total to a cupping score from 58 to 100.
  • Under the earlier SCAA system, specialty grade required 80 points in the cup and a pass in green grading.
  • Premium Grade is an SCAA green-coffee grade, not a band of cupping scores.
  • Since 1 October 2025, the SCA has run the Q Grader programme, with nine assessments and renewal every three years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the 100-point SCA form still the standard? No. Since 4 November 2024, the SCA's official cupping standards are Standards 102, 103 and 104 of the Coffee Value Assessment, which supersede the 2004 protocol and form. The new affective score is still given on a scale that reaches 100.

What score makes a coffee specialty? Under the earlier SCAA system, a cupping score of 80 or more together with a pass in green grading. No specialty score was found in the Coffee Value Assessment standards.

Why five cups for each coffee? So that the taster can tell whether every cup of the same coffee tastes alike. Cups that differ, or carry a taste defect, are counted and lower the score.

How often must a Q Grader renew the licence? Every three years under the SCA programme, through continued professional development. The full six-day course does not have to be taken again.

Does Puerto Rican coffee have a typical cupping score? No published cupping data establishing one was found. A score describes one taster's impression of one coffee under a named protocol.

Why do tasters slurp? Slurping spreads the coffee over as much of the mouth as possible, especially the tongue and the upper palate, as the SCA protocol requires.

Sources

Claims this encyclopedia could not source

  • A typical cupping score or flavour profile for Puerto Rican coffee. No published cupping records establishing one were located.
  • That Puerto Rican coffees regularly appear in international competitions with notable scores. No competition, year, producer or score was located.
  • That each point above 85 doubles the wholesale price, or that a 90-point coffee sells for four to eight times an 80-point coffee. No source was located, and the two claims contradict each other.
  • A band of cupping scores from 75 to 79 called "Premium". The SCAA cupping classes have no such band; Premium Grade is a green-coffee grade.
  • The requirements for SCAA Premium Grade. The SCAA grading protocol consulted names the grade but does not define it.
  • That specialty grade also required a roasted sample free of quakers. Found in trade writing, not in the SCAA protocol documents consulted.
  • A specialty threshold under the Coffee Value Assessment. None was found in the SCA standards consulted.
  • A date after which the 2004 form is no longer used. None was found in the SCA documents consulted.
  • What the SCA's continued professional development for Q Graders requires. It is not set out on the SCA page consulted.
  • The names of all nine Q Grader assessments. The SCA's published schedule names seven.
  • That the Q Grader examination has 22 tests. Widely repeated; no source was located.
  • The number of Q Graders since the SCA took over the programme. CQI gave ten thousand by 2024; no later count was located.
  • That Ethiopia uses traditional cupping methods emphasising particular local characteristics. No source was located.

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