Cupping is the standardized method coffee professionals use to evaluate and compare coffees, roasters, buyers, and quality graders all use some version of the same basic process, which makes it possible to meaningfully compare a coffee from Ethiopia against one from Colombia using a shared vocabulary and method rather than just personal impressions.
The setup is deliberately simple and consistent. A measured amount of medium-coarse ground coffee, following an SCA-standardized ratio, is placed into a cupping bowl, and hot water just off boiling is poured directly over the grounds, no filter, no brewing device involved. This lack of filtration is intentional, it lets the taster evaluate the coffee's full body and any defects a filter might otherwise mask.
After a few minutes of steeping, a crust of grounds forms on top, and the taster "breaks the crust" by pushing a spoon through it while leaning in close, deliberately inhaling deeply at that exact moment, since the aroma released right as the crust breaks is considered one of the most information-dense moments in the whole process for judging a coffee's fragrance.
The grounds are then skimmed off the surface, and tasting begins using a wide, shallow spoon. This is where the loud slurping comes in, tasters intentionally aspirate the coffee across their whole palate and up into the nasal cavity in one motion, which spreads the liquid as a fine mist across the tongue and activates retronasal smell at the same time, giving a far more complete read on flavor than a quiet sip would. It looks and sounds unusual to anyone watching for the first time, but it is a genuine, deliberate technique, not table manners being ignored.
Professional cuppers score coffee across a standardized set of categories, fragrance and aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, and overall impression, on scoring sheets like the ones used by the Specialty Coffee Association, and a coffee generally needs to score 80 points or above on an SCA-style sheet to be considered "specialty grade" at all. This scoring system is exactly what determines which lots get sold as specialty coffee at a premium and which get sold as commercial-grade. Perfect Daily Grind covers how professionals keep that scoring consistent between sessions, which is harder than it sounds.
You do not need any special equipment or training to try a simplified home version. Brew the same coffee a few different ways or from a couple of different bags, taste them side by side rather than one at a time from memory, and pay attention specifically to how the flavor changes as the coffee cools, since a lot of a coffee's actual character reveals itself more clearly once it has dropped below drinking-hot temperature. It is a genuinely useful exercise for figuring out your own taste preferences, covered more broadly in our taste-based drink guide.
If you want to see this in action rather than just at home, some specialty-focused shops occasionally host informal cupping sessions or tasting flights, worth asking about directly if you are a regular at a roaster like Franken Coffee Bar + Roastery, since shops that roast their own beans are the ones most likely to already be cupping regularly behind the scenes. Perfect Daily Grind's beginner guide to cupping is a good primer to read before you ask.