Ever been to a “cupping?” Despite what may come to mind, the term “cupping” has nothing to do with either gender’s undergarments. (So get your brain out of the gutter!) Much like wine tasting, cupping is the sort of ritual that coffee tasters go through to evaluate coffee. For coffee roasters, especially small-batch artisan roasters, it’s the primary way they maintain quality and consistency. Just as most of us begin our day with a nice cup of Joe, latte, soy macchiato, or otherwise, Mike McKim, founder and CEO of Cuvée Coffee, begins each day with a morning cupping from his “boutique” operation in Spicewood. (Just outside of Austin.)

Mike McKim of Cuvée Coffee

And if you’ve ever tasted a cup of freshly brewed Cuvée Coffee, you’ll soon understand why. This is not your average scoop of brown ground from a vacuum-sealed tin can. This is more like the Cadillac of coffee. And where most office-style drip coffee grows stale and cloyingly bitter—regardless of any attempt to make it taste better with powdered creamer, fancy syrups, or little pink packets—Cuvée is bold and full-flavored with essences of fruits, nuts, and earth. It tastes like silk. Like butter. Like good coffee.

The secret is in the beans. And in the relationships McKim has built with small-production farmers throughout the countries from which he purchases including Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Burrundi. (While most of us have seen a trend in the term “fair trade” coffee where farmers join a sort of co-op to receive a fair price for their crop, McKim operates his coffee buying on a “direct trade” model, which means he meets and works directly with individual farmers to insure they get the most of the bottom dollar once exporting, importing, and every other cost to sell coffee is factored out. This, unfortunately, is not always the case with “fair trade.”)

For McKim, taste and quality are top priority but so is the manner in which the beans from another country make it in to your morning brew.

“This is a key point of differentiation for us,” says McKim. “Lots of roasters claim to have relationships and ‘direct trade’ but that’s not always true. We actually have personal relationships with every farmer we purchase from. We also base our pricing structure to allow every person in the chain to profit. Good environmental practices lead to a sustainable model…our direct trade model.”

Cuvée also uses quality (i.e. cupping scores) as the foundation for taste in the final product. It’s a time consuming process as each morning McKim and his team taste at least 5 to 8 different batches of roasted beans, but it’s how Cuvée has made a national name for itself competing with the likes of Chicago’s Intelligentsia coffee and North Carolina’s Counter Culture coffee. It’s a structure that only allows for made-to-order coffee production. All of the coffee roasted each day is directly distributed to restaurants and coffee shops. Nothing is left on the Cuvée shelves by the end of the day.

So how does a cupping work?

The typical set up for a morning cupping at Cuvée

Every morning McKim and his team roast a selection of different beans and pulls a sample from each batch. This includes a variety of beans from his farmers in Central/South America and Africa. Each sample of roasted beans is ground and smelled. (Much like you would a glass of wine after it is first poured.) The grounds from each batch are placed in a small glass and hot water is poured over them to steep for 4 minutes. Each glass is then arranged on a round table next to a plate of the sample beans and a small glass of water.

When “cupping,” you simply walk up to each sample with a regular tablespoon in hand and follow these steps.

1. Smell the aroma of the coffee while it’s steeping.

2. Take the spoon and break the crust formed from the grounds that have risen to the top of the glass. Smell the vapor released from the steam. “Sometimes it just smells like coffee,” says McKim. “Other times you’ll get something that smells like sugar cookies baking or something more specific like that.”

3. Let the grounds settle and skim the film on the coffee. Be sure not to stir the grounds up, it will disrupt the flavor of the coffee.

4. Take a small amount of coffee into the spoon and quickly suck it into your mouth making a loud slurping sound. (Like you’re slurping soup.) This gets air into the coffee as it hits your palate and allows you to really taste the flavors from the beans. (Experienced cuppers will suck the coffee in and breathe through their nose at the same time to get all of the notes and flavors.)

Breaking the crust made by the fresh-roasted grounds for a cupping

Repeat this quickly for each sample around the table. And once you’re finished, go through the selections again. As the temperature of the coffee changes to room temperature, so do the flavors.

“As coffee cools down, that’s when the nuances come out,” says McKim. “It’s one of those fallacies people don’t realize. People buy these boiling hot coffees from a coffee shop, but they’re missing the best part about coffee—the taste.”

Something to consider the next time you find yourself in line waiting to make your daily coffee order. Speaking of which, the next time you do, consider giving the handcrafted taste of Cuvée a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Where can you find Cuvée?

Austin: Caffé Medici, Once Over, Thunderbird Coffee, La Condesa, Parkside, Bess Bistro, Walton’s Fancy and Staple,

Dallas: Eno’s Pizza Tavern, Oddfellows

San Antonio: Local

Houston: Down House, which will be opening later this month.

Tagged: Bess Bistro, Caffé Medici, Cuvée Coffee, Direct Trade coffee, Eno’s Pizza Tavern, Jessica Dupuy, la condesa, Local, Mike McKim, Oddfellows, Once Over, Parkside, Stir Coffee, The Pearl Cup, Thunderbird Coffee, Walton’s Fancy and Staple