Welcome...

First things first... This is not a contest. There will be no singular winner, and ipso facto no losers, either. Think of this as a tasting seminar, a skill-building exercise... maybe even a Zen workshop in the art of getting to know your coffee.

The challenge consists of a number of events, centered around tasting samples of various roasted coffees, profiling those tastes, and comparing them to a particular coffee blend. The goal is to tune our palates, and learn something about both single origin coffees, and the art of blending beans.

• Tasting.  Taste and profile single origin beans and Mystery Blend X, and attempt to identify the "world-origins" of the beans. Level 1 is active, and you can submit the Cupping Form today!

Results and Origins Revealed!!

The following links reveal all... if you're still cupping and don't want to know the results-to-date, and specific origins of the Mystery Cup coffees, don't look! 

+ Sample A + Sample B + Sample C

+ Sample D + Sample E + Sample X

 

Special Feature!
In the spirit of the Olympic games, we present a special feature of the Mystery Cup Challenge... find the the Russian Judge! We're probably all aware of the long-held reputation of the grumpy former Soviets... they're the folk who provided the well-grounded scores in a series, like: 10, 10, 10, 6.5, 10. 

The following chart shows the cumulative scores of all votes in the Mystery Cup Challenge. There are 300 total points [6 coffees, 5 attributes, 10 points each]. How generous... or how stingy, were you? ;)

 

Another Special Feature!
Jim Schulman is a fellow altie and something of a professional data grubber. He sent me some very interesting charts based off data he'd glommed from the Mystery Cup charts I'd published here. I was intrigued by his findings -- enough so that I forwarded him a copy of the original data set to see what else he might come up with. The result? The Mystery Cup Family Tree.

Resources:

Roast profiles of the Mystery Cup beans... 

Full sized plots will open in a new window.

Sample A	Sample B	Sample C
Sample D	Sample E	Sample X

See Also:

• Bloggle's On Tasting Coffee

• Sweet Maria's Coffee Tasting Terms, and

• Cupping and Judging Coffee, and

• The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, and

• Coffee Blending Basics

• Thanksgiving Coffee's A Virtual Cupping

• CoffeeResearch.org's Cupping Coffee

• Ken David's Coffee Tasting, and

• Coffee by Country

• INeedCoffee.com's Cupping

• Ted Lingle's Coffee Cupping