Coffee lessons from the wine world
Posted by TheShot on 05 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
Yesterday we came across a post where a Boston Globe writer implored winemakers to be more like their coffee counterparts: A lesson in winemaking – straight from the espresso bar . . . – By the glass – Wine News, Views & Reviews – Boston.com. It wouldn’t be the first time coffee’s wine analogy ran in reverse. We’ve also written how we wish coffee was more like wine. But a recent wine country experience in California’s Santa Ynez Valley highlighted how the coffee world could maybe learn a few lessons from the wine world.
The SYV, as some of the locals call it, gained a little notoriety a few years ago as the location of the popular indie wine flick Sideways. Like many popular wine-growing regions in California, local businesses lure the wine tourist through things like winery tours, barrel tastings, tastings rooms at wineries, independent tasting rooms for sampling wines from different area vintners, and even bars and restaurants that offer wine tasting flights of the local product.
Consumer behavior at these various SYV establishments mirrored what we observed at other wine growing regions throughout California. Tastings at the wineries themselves were tremendously popular. And yet neighboring independent tasting rooms — often additionally offering hard-to-get cult wines from boutique area growers with limited public hours or facilities — were largely neglected by the wine-drinking public. Meanwhile, famously wine-friendly cafés with their extensive wine bars and tasting flights — such as the Los Olivos Wine Merchant and Cafe (a Sideways star) — did a brisk business on food and dining but very little business in tastings or flights.
Drawing parallels, or leaping to conclusions?
It may be difficult to draw many accurate, let alone useful, conclusions from these consumer behaviors in the SYV and elsewhere. But what’s crystal clear is that wine tourists greatly prefer the experience of dealing directly with the winegrowers at their own tasting rooms. It’s quite likely that a more direct connection between a wine consumer and the wine grower, and the land they toil over, plays a major role in this consumer preference. What’s also quite clear is the serial act of sampling and comparing wines loses its appeal the further removed it becomes from its source of production.
Wine lovers and coffee lovers are hardly the same — let alone are the circumstances of their beloved product’s creation. But it was difficult not to draw parallels between wine consumers and their coffee counterparts. The affinity for winery tours and tastings reflected a consumer desire for a more personal connection to the roots of production. Wine lovers can ask direct questions of the staff, understand its specific terroir, and engage in discussions about their wine-making philosophy.
Coffee reflects this preference in coffee consumers’ interest in Direct Trade, buying microlot coffees from a single farm, and even a desire to go to origin. All forces of which seem to run counter to the nascent coffee middleman model adopted by the likes of Craft Coffee, GoCoffeeGo, ROASTe, and other retail intermediaries. Each of these actors serves more like the independent tasting rooms and bars that wine lovers largely ignored — taking coffee lovers one step further away from the product they love and where it comes from instead of one step closer.
When consumers experiment with their taste buds
Another parallel rises with the act of consumer sampling and comparing itself. Enjoying various tastings at a vineyard, wine consumers can directly connect the act of debating the merits of a specific vintage with a wine grower to also taking a bottle home for an equivalent tasting experience. With coffee, and particularly with the shoehorned concept of consumer coffee cupping rather than comparative tasting, that connection is completely severed.
When we encounter public cuppings at coffeeshops, it’s almost as if we have to ask, “Is this a bar or an educational center?” Am I here to relax and enjoy, or am I here because I am being tested? And tested for something I don’t reasonably experience at home. There’s an irony in that when Trish Rothgeb (née Skeie) coined the term “Third Wave,” she described it as enjoying coffee for its own sake. This effectively eliminates cuppings from any “Third Wave” classification — because cuppers are experiencing their coffee, with its crust-breaking and spoon-slurping ceremony, for completely different purposes than pure enjoyment.
Sustainable business models, or Show Us The Money
The last parallel concerns where there’s money to be made. For wine, while tastings and winery visits add a dimension to consumer enjoyment, the money is in consumers finding what they like and shelling out for regular habits. Wine tastings are a money loser for vintners; hence why they’ve developed a habit of charging for them in recent decades. (See the 2008 movie Bottle Shock for how radical an idea this was for Napa Valley wineries back in the 1970s.)
Coffee cuppings largely fail to create new customer habits because the experience is so far removed from how they’d regularly consume coffee at home. If wineries merely offered visitors the opportunity to stick their nose and fingers into bowls of grape must, how many more bottles do you think they’d sell? Meanwhile retail coffee middlemen promote the ability for consumers to easily swap out roasters as part of their experimentation, but experimentation isn’t a constant consumer state. And it isn’t where you make your money.
18 Comments »
I am constantly fascinated by how offended you are by public cuppings, and how this has provided energy for seemingly limitless rants against them.
I think you’ve drawn some good conclusions: i.e. that consumers love to “go to the source” and taste as close to the producer as possible. I see that every Friday at our roasting works and in each of our training centers, as dozens of consumers and pros alike gather to cup coffee together.
Of course, I disagree with your conclusion that cuppings fail to create new consumer habits. My experience- after doing weekly cuppings for the past 7 years- is precisely the opposite.
I still think you fail to understand what a cupping is. It’s just brewing coffee. In a cup. Just like a French Press. Except you smell it first, and sip it from a spoon (makes it easy to share). It’s just a ritual around brewed coffee tasting. It’s totally unlike smelling grape must, since must is not yet wine. The coffee we use in cuppings is exactly what people drink at home.
I was thinking of you the other day, as I read sprudge’s report of two cuppings they attended at our training center in NYC. I couldn’t help but think you’d love to cup with us. I still hope you do someday!
Peter G
If anybody was going to respond on the cupping issue, they would have to be from Counter Culture Coffee — who have arguably been the world’s biggest religious zealots for telling the world that consumer cuppings are fun for the whole family. Thus there’s clearly an element here where we both have to agree to disagree.
But to call cupping “just brewing coffee” is both lazy and incorrect. You are either cupping or you are not cupping. I first learned cupping from Alex Mason over at Royal Coffee back in the 1990s. At least back then it was a clearly defined, industry-internal practice that served two primary purposes:
The preparation, protocol, and experience for a cupping are all different from simply brewing a cup to drink while reading the Sunday paper. Just ask the Seattle Weekly. So to say that cupping is “just brewing coffee” is to dilute the term entirely to the point of being meaningless. Otherwise we have to tell our grandparents and their ancestors that they’ve unwittingly been cupping coffee all their lives.
If Counter Culture’s cuppings are really “just brewing coffee,” then you are doing it wrong, you are misleading laymen coffee consumers about what a cupping really is, and you’re perverting the term to fabricate some faux consumer mystique about the basic act of drinking coffee. But if you are instead doing a proper industry-practice cupping, then the rules in the original post above still apply. Pick one. Because if you sit on the fence, I gotta call bullshit.
Unfortunately it’s been 20 years since I lived in Durham, NC, and you guys didn’t exist back then. So I’m not sure when I might realistically next have an opportunity to learn cupping “the Counter Culture way”.
So far, I’m both a zealot and lazy! That is truly an achievement.
I don’t think you completely understand where cupping is, where it came from. You certainly seem to be operating under the assumption that it is a far more structured and static tradition than it really is.
The ritual seems to have been created over a century ago. At that time, all consumers drank coffee via the “open pot” method, where coffee grounds were mixed with hot water in a coffeepot. The grounds were allowed to settle to the bottom of the pot, and the now-brewed coffee was poured into waiting cups. This basic brewing method- the open pot method- is the most traditional type of coffee brewing. When sampling coffees, it was logical to miniaturize the pots- it would be a waste to brew large pots of a dozen coffees to sample- and tasters naturally used coffee cups for the purpose- putting a small amount of coffee into the cup, pouring hot water over the grounds, and smelling and tasting the resulting brewed coffee. Let me restate- the “cupping” process was just a way to make coffee on a small scale for sampling. That’s it.
Cupping evolved over the 20th century, and was used in a variety of circumstances for a variety of purposes, mostly commercial. At first, the purpose was to screen lots of coffee for defects. But even the earliest coffee tasting documents describe appreciating the qualities of the coffee- not just the presence or absence of defects. As the 20th century progressed, cupping documents increasingly describe using the ritual to appreciate the qualities of the coffee.
Cupping was never as clearly defined as you state. The process was loose and undefined, and practiced in widely different ways. Ted Lingle “wrote the book” to try to standardize the process a bit in the late ’80s. It is very true that throughout this time, cupping was a process used exclusively for coffee professionals.
It is our generation that adapted this process for consumers. That’s because it’s both practical and interesting! It’s great to talk about the history of this ritual, and to use it as a way to focus on the coffee itself. I think you make the point yourself- you say: “The preparation, protocol, and experience for a cupping are all different from simply brewing a cup to drink while reading the Sunday paper.” YES!!! That’s exactly why we should cup! When we sip coffee casually, we do other things like reading newspapers and chatting. When we cup, we focus on the coffee, allowing us to experience it in the fullest way. Consumers deserve to experience this too!
There are lots of different levels of formality in coffee. There is contest cupping, purchasing cupping, production cupping, QC cupping, cupping for enjoyment…. you might try recognize that diversity instead of constantly harping about “proper” cupping, which- like all efforts to impose propriety on anything- effectively sucks the fun out. Loosen up, man!
Peter G
This is starting to sound like some of the relentless (and tediously boring for most people) semantic debates I’ve had in the past with Nick Cho here.
I definitely appreciate the history lesson here. But given your definition of cupping as open pot brewing in small quantities, the simple act of consuming Turkish or Arabic coffee brewed in a cezve would be defined as “cupping”. Which gets back to my “a definition so diluted, it is meaningless” point. If you play fast and loose with definitions so that they apply nearly all the time, the ultimately don’t apply at all.
If there’s nothing to discriminate a cupping from drinking coffee, other than it doesn’t come out of a giant urn at a 300-person wedding, why inject counter-productive pretentiousness and tell everybody they’re suddenly “cupping”? What’s so morally wrong with telling people, “Hey, let’s taste some different coffees, just like you do at home?” and leave it at that?
Otherwise, I can’t wait until our generation adapts the process of meat inspection as something fun for consumers. There’s no reason to bastardize an internal practice and rebrand it for consumers — unless your aims are to create confusion and ambiguity for people within the industry and to alienate people outside the industry.
I’m normally very defensive when quality coffee practices are publicly held up to the insufferable snob litmus test. But to apply the word “cupping” to describe people drinking coffee together fails that test for me. But if there is some truth to “the preparation, protocol, and experience for a cupping are all different from simply brewing a cup to drink while reading the Sunday paper,” then what moral objections do you have to simply inviting people over to sample different brewed coffees without the additional baggage of pomp and circumstance?
Calling that a “cupping” unnecessarily obfuscates the set up and purposes of the event to a lay public. Meanwhile, simply telling folks that you’re going to comparatively taste brewed coffees would be more direct, would diffuse any snobbery apprehensions, and would provide more of a direct connection to the at-home coffee consuming experience.
And the common denominator is?
Nick, you know I don’t feel so special as to believe you only do it with me.
What I was doing was pointing out that your analogy between cupping coffee and “sticking…nose and fingers into grape must” was an inappropriate analogy. Must is unfermented wine, in cupping we use finished coffee. Likewise your past analogy between cupping and taking a side of beef apart with a hacksaw. Cupping is an organized tasting of the finished product of coffee, totally unlike any of the examples you use.
Of course cupping is different than simply brewing coffee in an ibrik. It is a recognizable and distinct process, developed for the purpose of focusing tasters on the qualities of the coffees in question. This makes it perfect for quality analysis by coffee buyers, and also quality exploration by consumers. It’s a ritual to focus on tasting brewed coffee in an organized way. This makes it different enough from traditional coffee brewing to make it worth doing, but similar enough that the results are very relevant.
There are lots of reasons to run a cupping instead of a french-press tasting or something. One is that if you do a tasting with french presses, people turn it into kind of a coffee party, chatting and socializing. This is fine, and there is after all a long history of coffee and socializing. It’s not great for comparative tasting of coffee. The traditional ritual of coffee cupping (fragrance, aroma, break, skim, slurp, take notes) has the effect of focusing the senses and attention on the coffee. This leads to an environment where insights and epiphanies are common.
Here’s a case in point: it’s a blog entry by a food enthusiast who came by for a cupping:
http://dontheapron.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/coffee-cupping-at-counter-culture-coffee-durham-nc/
I think particularly interesting is the following passage:
“I still am an extreme coffee novice — however, this class allowed me to indulge my perpetual curiosity for all things food and drink, and pick up some new knowledge. I have honestly never really been able to taste too much of a difference between coffees before (a wonderful breakfast experience with an Ethiopian coffee Ben made for me standing out of the milieu), but at CC I began to really pick apart some of the nuances. This is likely a function of their superior product, as well as good teaching and contagious enthusiasm for coffee. I appreciate the fact Counter Culture offers this for free, and look forward to heading back a few more times this year!”
This is not an isolated experience; dozens of consumers have this experience at cuppings I and others have led. Your opinion is that the above experience is impossible or unlikely. It is neither.
The reason we keep having this conversation is that you take every opportunity you can on your blog to attack public cupping and the companies that practice it. I can’t understand why. Did you have a traumatic experience or something you would like to share? I also think it’s odd that you attack others who dare to use “the wine analogy” (you regularly attack CCC for this in public forums) yet you make a blog post about it. And you yourself point out your own inconsistency between alternately attacking and defending the snobbish focus on propriety in coffee.
Peter G
Thanks for the detailed response, Peter. This is good stuff, btw, even if I don’t always agree with it.
The fact is that I like cupping. But would I hoist that on my mom? Chances are, she’d be a lot happier with the French press party you mentioned.
Wine tasting is fun for a lot of people because of its informalities, its parallels to the social experience of sharing wine at home with friends, and the fact that you don’t need a license to participate. Of course, wine tastings can be accompanied by scoresheets evaluating color, clarity, nose, etc., as an educational thing. I’ve had fun participating in a number of area tasting events and dinners hosted by the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, who not only nerds out on Burgundy wines but also adds a bit of odd cultural clapping and “la la la” singing as well. It’s fun for me, but for most people it’s overkill and even a bit creepy.
So what’s really so terrible about people having a good time? Has coffee, like restaurant dining and wineries and their food & drink brethren, forgotten that it is in the entertainment business? This is where James Hoffmann rolls his eyes at the “educating the consumer” mantra. Because the aim of lowering the fun factor for more serious coffee study is more often a vote in favor of the desires of the coffee purveyor — not the customer. And the less customer-centric your business, the more it’s set up to fail.
But I do get this sense that you are straddling the fence — i.e., “It’s cupping, but it’s kinda not.” “It’s fun for customers, but it’s about serious coffee evaluation.” It sounds to me like you’ve made a compromise to make something that’s only half as serious as a professional cupping and half as fun as a public coffee tasting event. And half measures typically get squeezed on both ends. Wine manages to uniquely address both options/audiences separately and, IMO, they largely get that right.
The reason I object to how these public cuppings are constructed isn’t about childhood trauma. Everything on this site/blog comes down to wanting to have greater access to better coffee. Public cuppings could be a golden opportunity to move everyone more in that direction, but as implemented it’s a largely wasted opportunity — for the simple reason that the industry seems to want to bring Mohammad to their mountain instead of the other way around.
My dad came to a cupping once, and had a great time. He then asked me if I would do it at his house. He invited all of his neighbors and friends, and we did a cupping in his kitchen. Just as we do at Counter Culture, I passed around little tasting sheets (without scores, just for notes) and I walked them through how a professional cupping works, and how we would do it in his kitchen. It was a gas! We all had a great time.
If I would have simply brewed coffee instead, it would have been LESS fun. There’s not much interest there, it’s a guy brewing coffee and pouring it into cups. Yawn. Learning about how professional coffee traders ply their craft along with a little lesson in the same ritual is fun for everyone!
I strongly agree that we in the food business are in the entertainment business. And people love the experience of cupping! They love learning about new things, they love tasting new things, and they love the interaction that goes along with it. I share your desire to give the public greater access to better coffee. I don’t share your opinion that public cupping represents forcing the public to experience coffee on our terms. Exactly the opposite; we’re bringing a deep experience of coffee to the consumer, and the interaction is open and enjoyable for everyone.
You say that “as implemented”, public cupping is unlikely to bring greater coffee to a greater number of people. After implementing literally thousands of public cuppings over the years, experiencing the positive effect they have had on the coffee scene in the communities where they were practiced, and the positive effect it has had on the businesses in those communities, I can assure you that you are mistaken. Public cupping is the industry and consumers meeting each other between Mountain and Mohammed, and having a great time there.
As Rumi wrote: “Out beyond ideas of right and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
Peter G
Your father certain has a unique perspective over most layman consumers. But your observation only counts the people who come in through the doors — not the people who stay away. For every happy customer who comes to your cuppings, I could probably count twenty people who roll their eyes at the cupping concept and think, “What snobbery. It’s just coffee.”
Ultimately, the ability to access better coffee more widely comes down to consumers supporting it with their dollars. That’s it. That means a lot of people currently nursed on Starbucks and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf need to make a quality leap — a leap which we all know is there. But to get them there, we’ll lose the majority of them if we put many off with a “snob factor” and don’t make quality coffee approachable enough.
Can you imagine the mainstream popularity of wine if vineyards told would-be wine tourists, “Sorry, no informal pours and socializing. You must learn how to do this the right way like we do within the industry.” And then they commence to sit visitors down at a table with scoresheets, instructions for how to sniff, swirl, and spit, etc. The consumer adoption rocket blows up on the launch pad.
What bothers me about public coffee cuppings is that they make good coffee more elitist than approachable for the audience of converts we need, defeating all our ability to access better coffees more ubiquitously. And then we complain that the public thinks coffee has gotten too snobbish for its own good and that it will always be in the shadow of wine consumption.
Again, you’re talking about public coffee cuppings I have never been to or seen. In fact, coffee cuppings- particularly the public kind- are fun and approachable. I really think you have a gigantic misconception of what cupping is.
But anyway, a good wine tasting is not just pouring glasses of wine and socializing. I know of dozens of wine tastings that are instructive, which include coaching on how professionals taste wine. I googled “wine tasting encinitas” (my town name) and here was what the third result- a wine-tasting meetup- said:
“Enjoy tasting new wines and socializing with others, learn about proper wine tasting techniques, and discover new seasonal wines to enjoy.”
You could very easily substitute “coffee” for “wine” and it would be a perfect description of a cupping.
And wait: you’re saying that any examples of a successful coffee cupping are invalid, since they have self-selected people who will be interested before they come in the doors? Even you must know that’s an absurd argument. Indeed, all activity in a free country is self selected. The fact that participation in public cupping has been growing steadily over the past decade should be evidence to you that you’re on the wrong side of this argument.
I agree that we need to appreciate and work against a perception of snobbery in high-end coffee, which is difficult: how do you proudly proclaim that coffee is “special” without making it precious (in the negative sense)? I actually think cuppings- along with other kinds of tastings, service paradigm experimentation, and plain ol’ friendliness- are a great tool in the coffee industry’s arsenal.
And, if you want to measure success in dollars as you apparently do- you will be comforted to know that the companies that are doing the best coffee, (and not coincidentally tend to do public cupping) are growing quite nicely, thank you.
Peter G
I’m confused. I thought you just spent the last several rounds of comments explaining to me why consumers need to have some industry flavor of cupping shown to them to do it properly — and not to leave it as some fun thing where people socialize too much over the act.
And self-selection isn’t an absurd argument. It’s a concern of the basic scientific method. You cannot look only at the data in affirmative to prove your point while disregarding or ignoring any potential data to the contrary. Looking only at affirmative data is just an echo chamber.
Of course, there’s no easy way to add a control to your “experiment”. But while you may delight 5% of the coffee fans into becoming leading converts to the cause, my concern is that there’s no leading from the middle for the other 95% that’s going to pay for all of this better equipment, better training, better sourcing, and better coffee.
Quality wine earned greater social acceptance because they lowered the bar to entry and removed snob-factor barriers. They removed reasons for laymen to feel intimidated or that they were becoming part of some elitist club. As a result, wine in my home town of Chicago went from coming like my skin color in the summer (“we have red and we have white”) to today where you can ask for a sangiovese at an Olive Garden and nobody rolls their eyes thinking, “Who does this asshole think he is?”
Putting laymen in front of controlled slurping and spitting and scoring — because that’s the way the pros do it — does more to create enemies out of that 95% than it does to make allies of that 5%. If that strategy works for Counter Culture because you’re growing that 5% to 6% (a 20% growth to your market), that’s great for you and may do well to help limit your competition. But in the process you’re putting a wedge in for that remaining 94%, and I care about that a lot more than I do about the margins of your specific company. Because when your ownership sells off Counter Culture to Starbucks for a nice profit when the time is right, my taste buds are left with the broader public consequences after your company is no longer relevant to my interests.
You’re really a polarized thinker!
What I have been saying all along is that public cupping is a useful tool in the arsenal of the coffee professional who seeks to promote delicious coffee. It’s tremendously appealing- both as an entertainment and an educational opportunity- to people who are curious about such things; especially the kind of people who would take a wine tasting class or a pizza making class or watch a program about how cheese is made. And there are MILLIONS of those people- think of the viewership of the food channel or those who read Salt or the Omnivore’s Dilemma! A public cupping is the PERFECT outreach for those folks.
It turns out, it’s acceptable to a wide scope of people. My dad’s kitchen was filled with normal folks- many of them weren’t even coffee drinkers- and none of them felt alienated. Those who are likely to find the public cupping “snobbish” indeed tend to avoid it, which is fine! We can then increase the connoisseurship of those who attend, and use other strategies- like sampling, for example; or different kinds of coffee shops- to further broaden consumer demand for delicious coffee.
You spend so much of your time tearing down one particular strategy for coffee promotion, you squander your energy. We coffee professionals use TONS of different techniques to reach out to consumers. Can we do better? Of course. And we’re doing better, every year. Do we deserve criticism when we fail? Of course. But your monomaniacal focus on public cupping as evil is getting a little weird, man.
Peter
Now that we’re completely off course from the original post here that started this all, it’s worth going back to the beginning.
The more formal tastings and flights of different wines — and things somewhat more disconnected from its “origin” — weren’t extinct in the Santa Ynez Valley. Something is still keeping the wine merchants and the independent tasting rooms in business. But it was clear that consumers were flocking to the more informal tastings (the “fun”, social events) and to more direct connections with the winemakers and their vineyards. A few (though not nearly as many) independent tasting rooms also did a brisk business, but there the customer attraction was more their food — rather than just their wine to keep them in business.
Does that mean we should close down all independent wine tasting rooms? No. Does that mean people don’t like “snootier” wine tasting experiences? Of course not. But what it does suggest is that a business, let alone an industry, may be in peril the more they focus on those rarefied experiences — particularly when they are favored at the expense of more consumer-friendly options for more informal, approachable, fun, and social occasions. The coffee industry is shooting itself in the foot by focusing on the former type of events, because it’s what they like, and grossly neglecting the latter kind that consumers actually prefer.
If suggesting this constitutes a monomaniacal focus on vilifying public cuppings, it’s entirely within your rights to defend practices that please yourselves more than they please the greater public of potential consumers. I’ll just reserve every right to say “I told you so” when Counter Culture, and coffee in general, fails to win over the public the way wine has. That would be just rewards for a business that refuses to be consumer-centric in its thinking and approach. Even more so when it has ready examples of success from related industries that it willfully disregards.
I guess here’s the place we disagree:
I see the cuppings we run as more like the tastings at the vineyards than the formal, “snooty” ones you describe. Visiting a roaster’s place is certainly more akin to visiting a winery than the wine traders you describe.
Of course, you try to skew the argument by saying any cupping is de facto “formal”, and if it is not formal (and by formal you mean not fun) then it is not cupping (although I have no idea on what authority you make that pronouncement).
We agree that finding accessible, enjoyable ways for consumers to explore coffee is an important thing for all coffee merchants. I say that cupping is a good tool in the arsenal in achieving this, you disagree.
However, I say that you have a bizarre and monomaniacal rejection of the cupping. I base this on the fact that you regularly rail against public cuppings, but you don’t seem to have been to many. You certainly havent been to ANY Counter Culture public cuppings, yet you link to Counter Culture EVERY TIME you criticize them. So you’re uninformed at the very least, if not downright disingenuous.
Peter G
I still believe that you’re either holding cuppings or comparative tastings. The idea of a “consumer cupping” still sounds like a hedge, which is why I asked all the questions. In your answers, it’s pretty clear that you don’t like comparative tastings because they espouse the wrong values that you don’t want to establish among the public. To me, that’s the outright rejection of being more consumer approachable with coffee.
I’ve been to many cuppings and enjoyed them, but they’re nothing I would put in front of a layman consumer as “fun for the whole family.” And if you’re talking about evangelists of the consumer cupping idea, anyone — not just me — would be hard pressed to find stronger pundits than Counter Culture. I don’t think either of us could disagree on that.
But I see consumer cuppings as just one example — albeit a more obvious one — of where the coffee industry has made it difficult for consumers to connect with and enjoy good coffee without having the industry try to convert the public into de facto employees first. Other examples include the SCAA’s outright banishment of consumers at their annual conference, or industry competitions that emphasize the technical merit of repetitive tasks that seem alien to consumer experiences with a barista, to things like disloyalty cards.
It’s as if the coffee industry is committed to self-destruction at every potential opportunity to engage better with consumers in an approachable fashion. And since it’s consumer dollars that are ultimately funding these ventures to begin with, the whole system risks stalling, or even collapse, without more consumer-focused means to connect them better.
You continue to refuse to acknowledge that a cupping is in fact a comparative tasting, and is in every circumstance where it is practiced. You have created a false dichotomy between cuppings and comparative tastings to serve your own ends. Consumer cuppings, contest cuppings, buying cuppings, quality control cuppings….they are all cuppings and they are all valid.
A cupping can be consumer-friendly or alienating, depending on how it’s practiced. Your problem is not with cupping per se, it’s with this perceived alienation between coffee professionals and consumers.
I agree there is lots of progress to be made here. Most coffee professionals I know are talking about this issue constantly, in the most humble and constructive ways- trying to find ways to reach consumers on their own terms, and find new ways to interact over coffee. Your “willful disregard” of consumers just plain doesn’t exist- if it does, then it is in the drastic minority. The only hostility I see is from your side, to be honest.
Peter G
You’ve made clear that you would shun the idea of consumers sampling from a bunch of French presses at an event, so you really can’t say they are the same thing.
Even if you could, why the pretense of calling it a “cupping” — a deliberate choice of industry jargon over the more consumer-friendly, less-need-for-explanation “comparative tasting“? That may seem like a trivial detail for someone like yourself within the industry. But to the casual coffee taster, it’s off-putting and emblematic of a larger, indifferent attitude towards the coffee-drinking public.
Haters are gonna hate. But, as an example indicator, this attitude is also ammunition for every Yelp reviewer who pours the one-star hate on good coffeeshops over their perceived pretentiousness. Which is partly why most of the best quality coffeeshops in the nation fail to break the top-10-ranked coffee spots in their respective communities on these consumer Web sites.
That hostility is real, it’s everywhere, it’s self-inflicted, and it’s totally unnecessary. By comparison, this is something most vineyards and wine shops have managed to avoid; consumers tend to blame the fellow wine drinker for any snootiness, not the winemaker.
Sometimes I wonder if the coffee business would survive if not for the caffeine. Quality coffee consumer marketing is a litany of miscues and failures, and good coffee seems to have only arisen in spite of itself.