Run a blind coffee tasting by having somebody who isn't tasting grind, brew and label every cup, holding grind, dose, water and timing identical across all of them, with no bags, prices or roaster names in the room. Everyone scores before anyone speaks. That gives you a ranking, and a house coffee is a narrower decision.
Key takeaways
- A tasting is only blind if the person preparing the cups isn't scoring them.
- Hold grind, dose, water and timing identical across every cup; which numbers you pick matters less than that they don't move.
- Write down what the winning coffee has to survive before the first cup is poured, not after.
- A cup score says how good a coffee is, not where it belongs: our lowest, 86.8, is an espresso coffee, and our highest, 93, is a filter coffee.
Set it up so the only thing anyone can judge is the coffee
Pick one person to prepare the cups, and make sure they aren't scoring them. They grind, weigh, brew and label every cup with letters that mean nothing to anyone else. Everything except the coffee is held identical: same grinder setting, same weight, same water, same vessels, same timings. Which numbers you use matters far less than the fact that they don't move between cups, so pick a set you can repeat.
Then take the room down to the coffee. No bags on the counter, no prices, no origins, no roaster names, no reactions from whoever runs the table. Scores go on paper before anyone speaks, because the first opinion spoken tends to become the room's. The Specialty Coffee Association publishes a standard covering this stage, SCA-102, Sample Preparation and Tasting Mechanics, one of four in its list of published standards.
Two additions cost nothing. Put one coffee into the lineup twice under two labels; the gap between its two scores is your own noise, and it tells you how much of the ranking to believe. And have somebody bring a coffee nobody in the room chose. The trade publication Perfect Daily Grind argued in March 2018 for a third party labeling the cups, and it's right: expectations follow your scores around, and the cheapest way to keep branding and price out of a score is to keep them out of the room.
Taste it the way you'll sell it, not the way it cups
A cupping bowl is a calibration format: no filter, no pressure, no milk, no time sitting in a server, which is what makes it fair for comparing coffees against each other. It's also a drink your business doesn't sell. A coffee that stands up across a row of bowls can go quiet inside a twelve-ounce latte, and the people ordering that latte every morning will notice first.
So run the shortlist twice. The bowls rank the coffees against each other. Then take the top two or three through the thing you actually pour: your machine, your milk, your grinder, made by whoever will make it at opening. A cafe buying for an espresso machine and a batch brewer is making two decisions rather than one, which is worth reading about in why a cafe recipe changes when the bag does before you set the lineup.
If the coffee is going to sit, taste it sitting. A breakfast urn, a church urn and a hotel service all ask a coffee to be good long after it was brewed, which isn't the question a first sip answers. Brew a batch, leave it as long as your own service leaves it, then taste it. That decides more than the cupping table does when we work out what to put in front of hotel guests.
A tasting gives you a ranking, and a house coffee needs a decision
Write down what the winning coffee has to survive before the first cup is poured. Write it afterward and you're not setting a criterion, you're describing whichever coffee won. The list is short and none of it is a score: which drink has to carry this coffee, who's making that drink at seven on a Tuesday, whether you can still buy it in six months, and what it costs against what you charge.
That's also why the people working your bar belong at the table, as the ones who'll hit it every morning rather than as judges of what's good. The guides that teach this are careful and specific right up to the last step, then hand the reader back their own preference. That's a fine way to end a tasting and a thin way to end a purchase.
Here's the concrete version. We publish a cup score on every coffee we sell and which brewer each one is built for, and the two don't line up. El Salvador Finca San Luis cups 86.8, our lowest, and it's the one we built for espresso. Ethiopia Buku Abel cups 93, our highest, and it goes to a filter brewer. Both numbers are on the product pages. A score answers how good a coffee is, not which side of your bar it belongs on, and the SCA keeps those questions in separate standards, SCA-103 and SCA-104.
Buying it again belongs on the list too. Harvests run out, and when one does the name on the bag can stay put while what's inside it moves; a single morning of tasting can't see that coming, and we took it apart in why cafe consistency is a measurement problem. Our own process has told buyers "you taste it first" at step three of becoming a wholesale partner, and it's never said what a tasting looks like.
A blind tasting can only compare what's in front of you
It can't tell you whether the winner will still be around in March, whether the roaster can hold that profile once the lot behind it rotates, or whether the thing wrong with your bar is the coffee at all. Your water, your burrs and the age of the bag move underneath every coffee you'll ever buy, and while they're moving, a tasting measures them instead of the coffee.
Here's the first honest limit. If your espresso tastes like a different drink at nine than at two, a tasting is the wrong tool, because you don't have a coffee problem yet. Fix what's underneath first; we wrote about where those decisions start in costing the coffee first when you open a shop.
The second limit sounds like a failure and isn't one. Sometimes two coffees finish close enough that the taste question is settled, and the choice moves to delivery, to whether a roaster can keep it in front of you, and to price. That's the method telling you it's done its part. Blind tasting exists to keep those things out of the room while the cup is judged; once the scores are down they're legitimate grounds to choose, and the SCA gives that category a standard of its own, SCA-105.
Questions we get about running a blind coffee tasting
How do you run a blind coffee tasting?
Somebody who isn't tasting prepares and labels every cup, everything except the coffee is held identical, and nobody sees a bag, a price or a roaster's name until the scores are down. Score first, talk second, reveal last. Putting one coffee in twice under two labels shows how much your own scoring moves.
How many coffees should you taste at once?
Fewer than you were sent, because a house coffee is a shortlist decision rather than a survey. Palate fatigue is real and it arrives quietly, so the later cups get less of you than the early ones did. We don't publish a ceiling and we won't borrow one.
How do you decide which coffee wins a blind tasting?
You decide against a criterion you wrote down before the first cup, not against the ranking. The ranking tells you what the room preferred that morning. The criterion tells you what your bar can pour every day: the drink that has to carry it, the person making it, and whether you can buy it again.
Should you taste the coffee the way you cup it, or the way you sell it?
Both, in that order. The bowl strips the variables out so the coffees can be judged against each other, the only fair way to rank them. Then take the top two or three through the drink you actually sell, because a bowl has no milk in it and no wait in a server ahead of it.
What do you actually need to run a blind coffee tasting?
A scale, identical vessels, one person who prepares the cups and doesn't taste, and paper. That's the whole list. The costly-sounding parts of a cupping setup exist to make results repeatable between labs, and you're comparing a few coffees in one room on one morning.
Bring the criterion, not just the shortlist
Bring the written criterion with you, not only the name of the coffee. Which drink has to carry it, who's making it, and roughly what you go through in a month are what a roaster needs before anyone can tell you whether they can hold it, and they're what our wholesale application asks for. We've roasted in Pensacola since 2023, we roast to order every Wednesday, and we grind free to whatever you brew on. We sell the thing this article teaches you to judge, and the method still works with our bags left out of the lineup.
