As part of the Dili Coffee Cupping Club that the guys from Kape Diem Coffee Lab have set up, we’re not only indulging our love of coffee by cupping as many different coffees as we can get our hands on, but we are also having fun in testing our sensory skills through the art of triangulation.

Cupping is all about being able to taste the coffee and pick out the different aromas and flavour notes of a given coffee, whilst seeing whether there is balance between the acidity and sweetness to give an overall quality coffee. It also allows you to be able to pick out any defects which may be present within the beans themselves, and whether there is consistency of flavour across each cup.

This takes skill and a lot of practice in order to be able to sense and taste the subtle flavours within a given coffee.

Another way to have fun whilst further honing your skills is through coffee triangulation. This is where you get a set of 3 cups, two of which contain the same coffee and the third being different in some way. This tends to be through adding a small percentage of another coffee into the bean mix to change the flavour of the coffee slightly.

The goal is to smell and taste the different cups to determine which one is the odd one out.

Sometimes it is glaringly obvious and other times it’s not. It’s all part of the fun!

Let’s just say that I will continue to have ‘fun’ with it 😉