Typica: Software for Coffee Roasting Operations

Writing About Centerlining Your Cupping Process

On September 7 I got a message on twitter from the editor of Daily Coffee News asking if I'd be interested in writing something for them. There wasn't any guidance on topic, length, or depth, but since I had been working on a new video series I had a fair amount of material that I thought could be adapted to an article format and I decided to write about a manufacturing practice known as centerlining and how that can be applied to make cupping practices within a company better. Today that article went live.

The great thing about centerlining is that once you do it, everybody in your company gets better and more useful results from cupping sessions without necessarily developing better cupping skills. It's one of those things that I think can benefit any company that cups coffee. A lot of people might look at this and say, "well, duh, of course you should do that," but I also know that most never do it or do it once and then never revisit that as their business and the tools they have available change. It's also a topic that nobody writes about, so it's possible that it just never occurs to a lot of people that there are choices involved in how to set up a cupping and that those choices can be made deliberately to make the job easier.

Update: Now that this article is no longer on the front page of Daily Coffee News, I've written a follow up article that includes the original unedited version of the article, some of the other related work I've been doing on educational resources, and some of the discussion that the article provoked.