The cup aroma is where most people drinking coffee get their first experience of the coffee aroma. Of course now that you’ve read about the dry aroma fragrance you will start their first, but aswe intend on drinking the coffee, adding water is the next obvious step in the process.
Given the countless methods of brewing coffee, in this description I will focus mainly on the experience you get when cupping. To brew the cupping coffee and to maintain the comparability of the coffee samples, the infusion method is used with a set ratio of water to coffee. According to the SCAA the ratio is most often set to 8.25 grams of coffee to 150ml, though I find 11 grams to 200ml easier to remember.
The water quality and temperature are also very important. The last thing you’d want to do is to contaminate the coffee with residual flavours and aromas from the water (will go more into detail on water quality at a later date). As for the temperature, it is recommended to have it between 90-95 degrees.
When pouring the water onto the coffee it is important to ensure that all of the grounds are wet to give the best chance for a balanced infusion. This will form a crust of coffee floating on top of the water. This brew should steep for 3-5 minutes during which time you have you first chance to get a whiff of the cup aroma. It is important to ensure that the brewing time for each cup is that same to maintain consistency.
There are two main stages to the cup aroma in this instance. the first is smelling the crust (which is exactly what it sounds like), and the second is breaking the crust. As the majority of the vapours will collect under the crust, smelling the crust before you break it gives you a chance to identify slightly different characteristics to when you break the crust. Breaking the crust involves using your spoon to gently press into the crust to release some (not all) of the coffee vapours. Do not stir the cup to release all of the vapours, both because it will ruin the experience for those following you, but it also makes it harder to remove the crust (which you must do before tasting the coffee.
In the cup aroma (or the wet aroma) you are trying to identify fruity, herbal, nutty scents, and any identifiable traits of taints or faults in the coffee. There’s a great table I saw about those recently that I’ll post here later on.
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