Tasting Towards the Future with WCR
A Cupping Journal from our Green Coffee Team
We work closely with our partners at origin, calibrating around quality, projected demand, and sustainability goals. This requires long-term, direct relationships with coffee producers and quality-focused exporters who can help us achieve our goals “on the ground.” Our sourcing program helps improve outcomes for producers by funding agronomy training programs for smallholder farmers, providing feedback around sustainability goals, and negotiating prices based on quality and production costs. However, we recognize that we can only create so much change a few hundred, or even a few million, pounds at a time.
That’s why we’ve been so proud to partner with World Coffee Research (WCR) this year. Their work aims to solve the biggest issues facing coffee producers. The development and evaluation of high-quality and highly productive new coffee varieties, in particular, has the unique potential to address both farmer profitability (through increased yields) and climate change (through decreased land usage).
In addition to our financial contributions to WCR, we were honored to be selected as cuppers and data donors for a recent round of trials to assess the flavor and quality potential of new variety candidates. We participated alongside cuppers from around the world to help determine which candidates are delicious enough to go forward for possible commercial release to farmers. It was eye-opening to see the quality potential of many of these varieties.
Blue Bottle’s Green Coffee Specialist & Lab Manager, Krystine Summers, roasted the coffees upon arrival, using our Ikawa sample roasters.
We then weighed out the coffees, with two bowls allocated to each person participating in the cupping.
Next, the coffees were ground, steeped, broken and cleaned, in accordance with Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) cupping protocols. Standardized methods for brewing and tasting coffees allow us to eliminate uncontrolled variables and score samples based on the attributes we’re aiming to evaluate—in this case, the genetic potential of the coffee varieties.
Once the coffees had cooled, we began tasting. We recorded numerical scores according to the SCA scoring system. Perhaps more importantly, we also compared samples to our internal quality standards, allowing WCR to get a sense of both overall quality and market viability.
Once we’d completed the process, we reported the scores back to WCR to be aggregated with data from the other participating companies. This will provide WCR with a comprehensive view of how these coffees would be received in the market, if they are widely distributed at origin.
We’d like to thank World Coffee Research for inviting us to participate in this project; visit their website to learn more about their work.