TRIANGULATION CUPPING - ROAST PROFILE
This week, we explain our approach to internal quality control as well as sharing one of the methods we've found particularly valuable. Cupping your profiles is a core practice of all coffee roasters, however, there are different ways to evaluate your profiles with some methods preserving more objectivity than others.
By way of our definitions, let’s unpack this a little bit,
Triangulation is a style of tasting where at our roastery; roasters / baristas / tasters are presented with a triangle of three cups of coffee, each with different profiles. All the coffees are roasted with the same whole bean and ground color, while matching end of roast temperature.
What we do at our roastery is we blindly mix two cups of the same profile and the third cup being a different profile. What is interesting here is, when we started doing this, we think it is easier than it actually is. By mixing the cups blindly and trying to pick up the best profile, quite often, we end up picking two batches of different profiles.
It's a great practice to really single out; is there a profile that is much better in all temperature and different variables, so that's why we do it. It becomes really efficient.
We basically weigh 10.8g of coffees (grounded), with a grind setting of "8.0" on a DITTING that we worked with. We are pouring 180g of water, giving us a 6.0g/100g (roughly). The reason why we are using 6g is that it makes it less strong, and easier to pick up notes of roast flavors or underdeveloped notes. If the beverage is too strong, we tend to find it is difficult to access the details of roasting.
By implementing triangulations at our roastery, we can develop confidence in our profiling, as well as creating more certainty that we're moving in the right direction without unconditional bias.