espresso or cupping which do you do ?

Ross_Quail

With the rise and rise of espresso standards, are we all just making straight espresso to assess coffee ?
Or is it more a question of, no need to cup it, if it is good as an espresso then there's no need.
I enjoy doing both and have found that cupping gives me what I want to know about a coffee, and espresso further enhances it as well as being the way I prefer to drink coffee, rather than the strict basis for assessment.

FreshCoffee2

In terms of my own business the greatest proportion of coffee sold is used in espresso machines. As such from a straight business point of view, we need to know that the coffee cups well in espresso form. Given that, its nice to cup coffee in the traditional way but remember, cupping in the traditional way is a tool for single origin coffee ie for the purpose of "checking" quality of the different coffees that are going to go into a blend. Once you have purchased & blended, you still need to cup it in the way the blend is going to be used in the end.....look at it this way....you may have used 100% best quality single origins, but the way they are blended will determine the outcome. You could use absolutely the best origins and still end up with a crap result through bad blending. Regardz, FC.

nunu

I tend to cup as espresso. I roast for espresso, so tweaking little bits within the roast give me vastly different outcomes when it comes to the shot in the cup. The extraction procedure is kept as constant as possible to control variability. While cupping is the best tool for assessing quality of SO, it isn't especially good for evaluating what the result will be as an espresso. Since the majority of coffee drinks are espresso based, espresso would and should be the baseline used for evaluation.