Twelve origins, 240 cups: the rubric we use, the four highest scorers, and the one we declined.
Every quarter we lay out a full cupping table to decide what makes the menu. This spring that meant twelve origins, five cups each across two sessions — 240 cups in total — scored blind on the SCA form. Here's what made the cut and what didn't.
The rubric
We score on the standard SCA 100-point scale: fragrance and aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, and overall, with deductions for defects. Anything under 84 doesn't make the menu, full stop. But the number is only half of it — we also keep a plain-language column for whether a coffee is one we'd actually want to drink a whole bag of. Plenty of technically clean coffees are simply boring.
The four highest scorers
- El Paraíso Geisha (Colombia) — 91. The clear winner. Bergamot, white peach, tea-like and long. Easily the most aromatic coffee on the table.
- Aricha Lot 47 (Ethiopia) — 89. Clean, blueberry-and-honey, jasmine lift. The crowd-pleaser, and rightly so.
- Karatu AA (Kenya) — 88. Blackcurrant snap and cane-sugar sweetness, with that wine-like Kenyan structure.
- Finca El Injerto (Guatemala) — 87. The dependable one: cocoa, caramel, red apple. Scores well and drinks even better.
The one we declined
We turned down an experimental anaerobic natural that scored a flashy 88 on paper. On the table it was all funk — boozy, fermented, almost solvent-like — and while a few tasters loved it, most of us agreed it would polarise subscribers and overwhelm anything else in a box. High score, wrong coffee for who we are. We passed, and told the producer exactly why; that conversation matters more than the single lot.
“A score gets a coffee onto the table. Whether we'd happily drink a whole bag is what gets it onto the menu.”
Cupping log, session two
All four top scorers are live in rotation now. If you're on a subscription, you'll see them cycle through over the coming weeks — and the Geisha, as a microlot, will go fast.
