Want to learn coffee roasting? Why is the first step not touching a frying pan but practicing cupping? This article starts from the apprenticeship experience of a senior roaster, outlining the key role of cupping in green bean purchasing, roasting curve setting, and flavor judgment, while reviewing the changes in China's roasting market over more than two decades and how the concept of specialty coffee has slowly penetrated consumers. The article also intersperses the philosophy of stable output and real data on customer cultivation, and includes product recommendations from Front Street Coffee, suitable for every enthusiast who takes coffee beans seriously.
Cupping is the key to getting started
In Uncle Bean's specialty coffee shop, every day at five in the afternoon, the staff spontaneously play a small triangular cupping game, which over time has become a daily habit.
Cupping is first and foremost the basis for negotiation and pricing between roasters and green bean traders. Every year, Uncle Bean conducts a green bean calibration with green bean traders, both to prevent the other party from exaggerating and to show them the basis for his bid, so that both parties reach a consensus on the flavor perception of this bean. For roasters, cupping ability is crucial. "The skill of cupping is like needing to know characters to speak, or needing to read music to sing. If you only wait for others to teach you sentence by sentence, and you have no sensory judgment of your own, you will always be passive when purchasing green beans, ultimately causing direct economic losses. The fundamental reason some roasters cannot buy cost-effective coffee beans is insufficient cupping ability."
Second, cupping ability is closely linked to roasting results. "When I first became an apprentice, my master had me roast the same kind of bean every day for ten consecutive months, and each time he asked: What do you want to roast it into? At first I resisted, thinking, aren't you just asking me to roast this Brazilian bean? Just roast it well, isn't that enough? But later I began to ponder his question, and gradually I was able to describe my expectations for the roasting result in more detail, for example: I hope this bean comes out with higher body and softer acidity. This is like a sailor steering, where every turn has a precise value. Having cupping ability is not about making your taste buds picky. With the same bean, some people taste three flavors, and some can taste eight. The meaning of cupping training lies in identifying and judging the taste of coffee, so that you have a clear idea in your mind. This must be done through repeated tasting, just like copying a new character ten times. If you want to enter the roasting industry, the first thing is to learn cupping."
"I myself have not attended professional roasting training. All my professional knowledge was accumulated bit by bit through practical operation while apprenticing in a roasting workshop. Now the education and training market is mixed in quality, and I do not know whether training can improve you. I prefer learning through practice. Do not touch roasting lightly; it is not as simple as you imagine. If you want to learn roasting, then start with cupping, focus on the coffee beans themselves, and understand the relationship between the physical state of green beans before and after roasting and the flavor they present."
With a rigorous attitude, "make a living," and insist on stable output
When asked why he chose the coffee roasting profession, Uncle Bean said he wanted nothing else but to support his family and make a living. "I first did green coffee bean trading. At that time I knew nothing about coffee. Visiting places of origin was entirely from a commercial perspective, judging whether the green bean price was reasonable and whether a purchase agreement could be reached. Later I left the trading company and went to a roasting factory in Europe as an apprentice. After so many years, this is all I know, so I have stayed in this line."
Now when walking into a coffee plantation, the local unique natural conditions, the main cultivated varieties selected in the plantation, the processing methods of the coffee beans, and the plantation's business model are all within the scope of Uncle Bean's examination of green beans. "A plantation choosing a main cultivated variety must have its reasons—whether it adapts to the local natural conditions, what flavor characteristics the natural conditions can give that variety, and whether there have been major pests or diseases in its cultivation history. These all need to be carefully considered when purchasing green beans."
After buying green beans, Uncle Bean regularly checks the temperature and humidity of the green bean storage room. The length of storage time and subtle changes in warehouse temperature and humidity will affect the physical state of the beans and directly determine the quality of the coffee beans after roasting. Each time he prepares to roast, he also makes corresponding adjustments to that day's roasting curve based on the measured values of the green beans that day.
Roasting and fashion design have something in common: both emphasize the relationship between structure and style. Only after green beans are roasted can people taste the flavor of coffee, so roasting is not creation, but revelation. Different methods of revelation produce different flavors. But after flavor is formed, it still has structure and relationships. For example, the relationship among acidity, bitterness, and sweetness in a bean, and how to present the acidity, whether to make it bright or soft. In addition, after the flavor is presented, how to reproduce it, and whether one can detect changes in room temperature, storage time, moisture content, and firepower, and adjust accordingly—this is the philosophy all roasters should uphold: stable output. Ensuring that every batch of the same product maintains the same quality requires long-term training and cultivation. Every cup of coffee, from green bean selection to roasting curve setting, must go through strict quality control at every stage.
Changes in China's roasting market
When Uncle Bean first entered the industry in 2001, Chinese roasters were mainly concentrated in three regions: first, the Pearl River Delta economic development zone represented by Dongguan and Shenzhen, where roasters were small in scale, numerous, and low in entry barriers, and the machines used were mostly made in Taiwan or domestically imitated from Taiwan. At that time, it was simply processing green beans into roasted beans and selling them to middlemen or directly to hotels and coffee shops. Second, the Yangtze River Delta centered on Shanghai, mainly Taiwanese-funded or domestic enterprises. Due to operating costs, their scale was much larger than the small factories in Dongguan, and the equipment was mostly imported. In addition, Beijing at that time was also considered a center, with few roasters, mostly using a direct-sales approach.
"The current roasting market has largely kept the same structure. With equipment upgrades and the accumulation of practitioners' experience, roasters have not only increased capacity but also moved toward greater professionalism in roasting. In the past, most roasters knew nothing and only knew how much the green beans cost and what color to roast them to. They themselves did not drink coffee. Now? Even the most rustic roasting factory will set up a cupping table and give scores to evaluate whether the beans are good or bad. When I first entered the industry, there were only about a hundred or so roasters; now I estimate there are three or four thousand." Uncle Bean explained.
Before specialty coffee appeared, the boundaries among growing, roasting, and brewing in the coffee industry chain were very clear: plantations sent green beans to the side of traders' ships, traders transported green beans to the side of roasters' ovens, and roasters then placed coffee at the side of baristas' counters. Now these boundaries have blurred. Baristas can roast coffee beans, roasters can directly participate in green bean purchasing, and if they have ideas about a plantation, they can also participate in its operation. This unclear division across the whole environment has also caused more people to flood into the roasting market. This situation has arisen precisely because of a lack of understanding of roasting and indifference to roasting technology. "Why in China can someone who has studied barista training for two days dare to open a coffee shop, while someone who has studied knife-cut noodles for two days does not dare to open a noodle restaurant? Because the evaluation system for knife-cut noodles is more mature; customers know whether it is authentic as soon as they taste it. But for coffee, no one knows whether yours is good or not. At present, China has no authoritative evaluation system or quantitative standards."
The slow cultivation of customers
In 2009, Uncle Bean's independently operated coffee roasting workshop opened at Lize Bridge on the West Third Ring Road in Beijing, where one can experience the whole process from green beans to a cup of coffee. From its official opening in March 2010 to March 2012, the nearly 350-square-meter shop had very few customers over those two years, and the business could not make ends meet. At that time, chain coffee shops were all the rage, and consumers had very low awareness of the concept of specialty coffee, let alone making coffee from coffee beans. To turn the business around, Uncle Bean launched coffee experience classes on group-buying websites for as little as 10 yuan, using 2 hours to tell customers how coffee beans are roasted, how to make a cup of coffee, and how to taste it. It was precisely by relying on the popularization of this basic knowledge that he slowly attracted some stable customers.
"In more than four years, the number of people participating in the group-buying courses reached 50,000, but these people were not the real consumer group. It is no exaggeration to say that people who came to the experience classes were of all ages, and the vast majority came to watch the excitement. Some even never drank coffee. The reason they came was simple: it was not expensive and they could have some fun listening." In 2010, Uncle Bean's Taobao store often had weekly sales of only 300 yuan, but now the Taobao store has reached two crowns and has also opened on Tmall. However, among those 50,000 course participants, only about a thousand may have truly formed a purchasing habit.
"From when I entered the industry until now, the coffee-drinking group has basically not changed much, and the business has not had an obvious turning point at any stage. It is just that I have been in this business for a long time, so I feel such a slow growth trend. But I can say for sure that the future development trend of the coffee market will be very good, and the entire industry will grow steadily and rapidly, but it is still hard to say who can get a share of the market growth." Uncle Bean added with a smile.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
