The Evolution of the Cupping Lab
Whenever you cup test nickel-weight samples of a new chop from your jobber, grind to the fineness of corn-meal, have your cuspidor nearby, and remember that breaking the scrum is an important part of the test.
A hundred years ago, this is how the activities in a coffee cupping lab might have been described. While some of the terminology can still be heard today ( a “chop” of coffee is still used, usually in commercial coffee trading, to refer to a shipment or portion of a shipment with identical coffee under the same mark; and people might look at you funny, but you can still call your spittoon a cuspidor, Portuguese for “spitter,” if you like), but at least one of these words has fallen completely out of favor and is unlikely to return. The word “scrum” was replaced by the word “crust” long ago.
The phrase “cup testing” was used early in the development of taste evaluation procedures for coffee. Prior to the 1890’s, quality inspections for coffee were mostly visual. Coffee quality was judged and price determined by the size and color of green beans. By 1932, when Tea & Coffee Trade Journal published an article by B.D. Balart on taste testing, the title was “Removing the Guess Work from Coffee Cupping.” Nevertheless, when you look up “cupping” in the index of the 1935 edition of All About Coffee, it says, “See Cup-Testing.”
Creation of the cup quality test as a means for evaluation of coffee is generally, though not exclusively, attributed to San Francisco green broker Clarence E. Bickford, active until his death in 1909. On the roasting side, Hills Bros., was an early adopter of the cup quality approach. If they were going to pay a quality premium, they wanted it based on cup characteristics, something they too could charge more for, not the size and color of the bean, because high-grown smaller beans tended to taste better. Cup testing is one of many coffee innovations to emerge out of San Francisco’s dynamic coffee sector as the century turned, becoming more important as the amount of Central American coffee arriving at that port increased. Although cup testing technique was advanced and developed by many coffee professionals, B.D. Balart was one of the earliest to clearly articulate, if not create, a complete and formal procedure. (The “B” in “B.D.” comes from his nickname, “Bert.” His Spanish birth name was Dagoberto).
Born in New Orleans in 1983, around the time Bickford first began exploring cup quality as an evaluation approach, Balart and his family relocated to San Francisco just as the “gold rush” roasters were coming into their own on the west coast and pushing east to the Rockies. His father died in a hunting accident in Napa when was 18. By the time he was 21, he was a competitive cyclist, or “wheelman,” and working for Ceylon Tea Company. Balart then went to work at wholesale grocer, Wellman, Peck & Co., which had a significant coffee business and where his duties may have included driving because in 1909, at age 26, he was registered with the state of California as a chauffeur. In 1913, he and his wife purchased a house at 133 Capp Street, a house that appears to still be standing, from his mother. He then went to work at importer/exporter, American Finance and Commerce Company, where his responsibilities included travel to coffee growing countries. In 1920, Balart was elected to the Executive Committee of the two-year-old Green Coffee Association of San Francisco, forerunner to the Pacific Coast Coffee Association. In 1921, the national “Export Trade Directory” listed him as Assistant Manager at the American Finance and Commerce Company.
In 1922, Balart moved to the roasting side of the industry when he purchased a controlling interest in Bain-Alexander after Mr. Bain retired. The company became Alexander-Balart and B.D. its vice president. It appears this is also when his interest in “removing the guesswork from coffee cupping” began. The Alexander-Balart Company would go on to create the brands Million Dollar Coffee, Tillman Coffee, and Alta Coffee.
Even though Covoya's new coffee laboratory in Brazil is state of the art, with the goal of becoming a Q Certified lab, B.D. Balart would recognize much of what happens there, just like we recognize in his detailed description of cupping procedures from 85 years ago the fundamentals of everything we do in the lab today.
The most significant advances over what B.D. was doing in his lab at Alexander-Balart in 1932 have to do with accuracy, control, and expanded vocabulary.
Blind Coffee Tasting, © Time Inc. Photographed by: Grey Villet
Bickford and Balart were both advocates of blind tasting, believing it impossible for cuppers to set-aside their bias and pre-conceptions if they knew what coffee they were tasting. As a lab preparing for Q Certification, the coffee lab created to serve the new specialty coffee division for Covoya Brazil will be able to go the extra sensory mile required for unbiased evaluation by with black out conditions and red lighting, which masks any recognition related to color.
Though we cannot know for certain, it is unlikely that Bickford and Balart demanded as much control on the environment as available at the Covoya Brazil lab. The lab is temperature controlled and air movement, disruptive sounds, and odor that interferes with evaluation (including roasting) can all be completely eliminated in our lab during cupping so that full sensory attention is given to the coffee, whether we are cupping for quality control or to discover the next new Brazilian specialty coffee.
Two things Balart would recognize in our Brazil lab are the scales and a grinder, though he might be more than impressed by the accuracy of each compared to the equipment he used. Balart simply noted that the scale “must be very accurate.” The scale in our Brazil lab is accurate to 0.01 grams and compliant with American National Standard Institute requirements. Our grinder can remain within a 10% difference in particle size between grinds of the same coffee. It is unlikely Balart’s grinder could achieve this level of consistency, but in his roasting plant the production grinders probably had an attachment you might not recognize, a powerful magnet to keep “wire nails, bolts, and other iron or steel objects from damaging the cutter parts.”
Probably the most foreign and “magic” instrument to Balart in our cupping lab would the Lighttells CM-100 roast degree analyzer. In Balart’s day, there was no “cupping roast.” Each coffee was evaluated at its production roast level and at that time production roasts came in five levels of development: light, medium, dark, Italian and French.
The most basic components of a cupping lab have not changed since Balart’s time. His inventory listed, in part: 1 dozen cupping glasses, cups, or bowls; 1 dozen sample coffee trays; 1 dozen bullion spoons; 1 tea kettle. Although, we might be a little pickier about our spoons, which must be non-reactive metal and hold 0.135 to 0.169 ounces of coffee to meet Q Certification specifications.
Coffee Aroma Perception Poster
Other things you’ll find in Covoya's Brazil coffee lab upon certification that you wouldn’t find in Balart’s lab include cupping forms, black grading mats, Le Nez du Café kits, an organic acids kit, various aroma and tasting vocabulary posters, and a water filtration systems. Although you wouldn’t have found a defects kit or handbook in Balart’s lab, he did have a list of 20 defects which included the following three possibilities: small clod of dirt, medium clod of dirt, large clod of dirt.
The coffee industry has come a long way since B.D. Balart claimed that coffee cupping should not be guesswork. No doubt, Covoya's new Brazil cupping lab would be like science fiction to B.D. Likewise, Brazilian specialty coffee has come a long way over the last 25 years. And yet, in both cases, the fundamentals have remained. What matters first is not what’s in the cup. What matters first is people who care about what’s in the cup.
