6.2 SCA-102 Cupping Steps: Fragrance, Aroma, Break, Skim & Liquoring

SCA-102 distinguishes two ideas that older protocols blurred:

• Cupping steps are the operations you perform: assessing fragrance, brewing, and liquoring.
• Cupping sections are the categories of perception you assess along the way, such as fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, sweetness, mouthfeel, and overall.

The steps stay the same whether you are doing a descriptive or an affective assessment. What changes is how you rate each section.

The cupping sections

Step 1 — Fragrance

As soon as it is practical after grinding, sniff the dry grounds in each cup. This is the fragrance section and is purely olfactive. SCA-102 lets cuppers decide whether to shake the cup while assessing fragrance. For batch-brewed descriptive work, a separate cup or tray of dry grounds is provided.

Step 2 — Brewing and aroma

1. Pour water at 93 ± 3°C from a spouted carafe to the rim of each cup, gently creating turbulence. Filling to the rim matters because the dose was calculated to the rim.
2. A crust or dome of coffee and water slurry forms. Assess the aroma of the undisturbed crust, and leave it unbroken for 3–5 minutes.
3. Break the crust by stirring it approximately three times while sniffing the vapors released. Both the undisturbed-crust aroma and the break aroma form the aroma section.
4. From the break onward, rinse spoons in hot water before they touch the brew in any cup.
5. When several cuppers share a table, they split the cups so each cupper breaks at least one cup's crust from as many samples as possible. Each cupper may sniff the broken cups before skimming.
6. After every crust on the table is broken, skim the grounds and oils from each cup's surface with one or two spoons and discard them.

If a brewing error leaves some cups short of volume, extra water may be added after the crust is broken to match the other cups. With batch brewing for descriptive work, there is no crust and no break, but aroma is still assessed from the fresh brew.

Step 3 — Liquoring rounds

• Let the brew cool to about 70°C before liquoring begins.
• Slurp a spoonful from each cup so it covers as much of the mouth as possible, especially the tongue and upper palate.
• Assess the brew in the mouth, then eject it to avoid swallowing too much caffeine.
• Do at least three rounds of liquoring as the coffee cools below body temperature.

During these rounds you assess flavor, aftertaste, acidity, sweetness, mouthfeel, and, finally, overall.

Cupping in parallel

All coffees on a table are brewed and cupped in parallel: step 1 for all coffees, then step 2 for all, then step 3. That keeps every sample at a comparable stage and temperature.

Loading diagram...

Descriptive, affective, and combined assessments

SCA-102 defines a combined assessment as one in which descriptive and affective assessments are done in parallel but separately for each section. The CVA forms include a combined form for this purpose. SCA-102 notes that cuppers using the combined form should reduce the number of coffees per session to allow time for the more thorough work.

Heritage numbers to unlearn

A timing example

For a table of four coffees with five cups each: grind and assess fragrance for all 20 cups; pour all cups in sequence; start a timer at the first pour; assess the crust aroma; break at about 4 minutes, which is within the 3–5 minute window; skim; then begin liquoring when the first cups reach about 70°C. Move around the table in the same order on each round.