As a trading company, we are the graders and gatekeepers for coffee roasters and suppliers. When samples come in, we grade them, cup them, create a profile, check them on food safety parameters, and decide if they are suitable for our customers. We ensure that you, as a coffee roaster, get the coffee that you are looking for.
The SCA cupping protocol and cupping form are essential tools that enable us to find fitting coffees. Many traders, importers, and exporters, however, have devised their own forms and evaluation scales. But at Trabocca, although we always improve our descriptions and our internal and external calibration, our cupping protocol is built on the SCA cupping protocol standard and cupping form. And here’s why.
The SCA form is the Specialty coffee industry standard, making it easy to communicate with both roasters and producers. We never have to explain our form or our calibration. And no parties have to ‘learn’ our system to understand our scores and descriptors.
The SCA form is the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) taught form; the form that is used by the Q Arabica Graders. This allows for relatively easy education for our cuppers. Additionally, CQI provides Q grading courses in many coffee-producing countries. If our producers are cupping their own product, it will usually be based on the same form that we use. This makes it much easier to communicate and to give feedback to them.
Another bonus, as our cuppers are led by Q Graders, is calibration between our offices. This has become far easier
since all Q Graders are calibrated to the CQI standard.
To get the best understanding of a specific coffee, we cup one batch up to three times before it reaches your roastery. At first, we receive an offer sample. This sample represents something we could buy. If we find a destination for this coffee, we create a purchasing contract and receive a pre-shipment sample.
The pre-shipment sample is the most representative of the actual coffee that will be loaded onto the container, ready for shipment. We cup the coffee again on arrival, to check if anything bad happened during shipment. You can imagine how many samples we cup on a yearly basis.
Amsterdam: 2143
Minneapolis: 551
Total: 2708
Amsterdam: 1932
Minneapolis: 722
Total: 2671
Amsterdam: 2213
Minneapolis: 894
Total: 3107
Amsterdam: 2218
Minneapolis: 1159
Total: 3395
Before roasting, our samples are measured on water activity, density, and moisture level. This is mostly done to make a first quality inspection, and although it influences the way the bean reacts during roasting, the roast profile is not adjusted.
This is because we always follow the same roast profile as much as possible. As we are trying to determine the actual quality of the bean, and not get the ‘best’ result for the bean, because that could result in a personal preference.
Trying to keep as many factors the same, makes it easier to understand the beans on our cupping table and their quality compared to other beans. (Download our ‘sample roasting protocol’ poster at the bottom of the page).
The beans are roasted the day before the cupping session, to allow the bean to rest after roasting. The next morning the cupping is set up, with five cups per batch, to better detect possible irregularities, faults, and defects. Batches that seem to be under- or overdeveloped are not scored, but rather re-roasted and re-cupped. This is also done with pre-shipment and arrival samples that score very different than expected, to make sure a bad score is based on the coffee,
and not something else.
It is difficult to give an exact cupping recipe because after testing water composition, boiling temperatures (water boils at much lower temperatures in Ethiopia for example), extraction and roast degrees, all our offices have their own best practices cupping ‘recipe’.
These best practices, which differ for each office, work best for their environment but also result in the most similar end result compared to our other locations.
However, generally speaking, all offices follow these guidelines:
After the cupping session, all joining cuppers discuss their results together and the coffees – which were cupped blind – are revealed to the group.
At this point, final decisions on what to do with specific batches are made; which roaster would fit this coffee; what feedback do we need to give to the producer; or if the sample needs to be re-cupped.
We hope we’ve made a sound argument on why you should use the SCA cupping protocol. Learn more about the cupping protocol through the SCA protocol page.
If you want to read more about our sample roasting protocol, then download the ‘sample roasting protocol’ poster.