Picture a long wooden table in Holualoa, set against the quiet slope of Mauna Loa. The morning air carries the smell of wet earth and coffee blossoms. On the table: a row of identical ceramic bowls, each holding a precise amount of freshly ground Kona. A timer sits to the left. Silver spoons rest on a folded cloth. A kettle steams on the burner. This is not breakfast. This is work.
Before any bag of coffee leaves our farm, before any roast is approved for sale, we sit at that table and cup the batch. We evaluate it systematically, attribute by attribute, bowl by bowl. We write down what we smell, what we taste, what lingers. We score it. Only then do we decide whether it meets the standard we have built Buddha's Cup around.
Cupping coffee is how professionals taste and score a batch. It is the most important quality control ritual in the entire coffee industry, and most coffee drinkers have never heard of it. That is a gap worth closing, because understanding cupping changes how you read a coffee label, how you think about price, and how you experience your next cup.
In this article, we will walk you through what cupping actually is, how the professional protocol works from first sniff to final score, what each of the ten scored attributes means, and how the 100-point scale translates into real purchasing decisions. We will also bring it back to Kona, to our farm, and to what cupping reveals about the coffee you order from us. We will even show you how to try a simplified version at home.
If you have ever wanted to understand what separates a great cup from an average one, this is where that understanding begins. You can explore the broader world of facts about coffee tasting as a foundation, and then come back here to go deeper into the professional process.
What Cupping Coffee Actually Is (And Why It Exists)
Coffee cupping is not a tasting party. It is not a preference survey. It is not the kind of casual sipping you do on a Sunday morning while reading the news. Cupping is a controlled sensory evaluation methodology, standardized across the global coffee industry, designed to assess a coffee's quality in a way that is repeatable, comparable, and bias-resistant. The distinction matters enormously, and it is worth unpacking carefully before we talk about what happens at the table.
The Controlled Experiment Behind Every Great Cup
At its core, cupping is a controlled experiment. Every variable that can be standardized is standardized. The grind size is set to a specific coarseness. The ratio of coffee to water is fixed. The water temperature is measured precisely. The steep time is timed exactly. The order in which evaluators smell, taste, and record is choreographed in advance.
Why does that level of control matter? Because without it, you are not tasting the coffee. You are tasting the brewing method. You are tasting the variables. If one sample is brewed in a French press and another is brewed in a drip machine, the differences you perceive between them may have nothing to do with the coffee itself and everything to do with the equipment. Cupping eliminates that confusion by holding every brewing variable constant so that the only thing left to evaluate is the coffee.
Think of it like a scientific blind trial. When researchers test a medication, they control for age, weight, existing conditions, and dosage so that the only variable changing is the drug itself. Cupping applies the same logic to coffee evaluation. By controlling every variable, from the size of the coffee grounds to the temperature of the water, professionals can isolate the coffee's true character and evaluate it on its own terms.
This level of rigor is what makes cupping scores meaningful. When a roaster in Seattle reads that a lot scored 87 points, that number was produced under conditions nearly identical to what would have been used to score a competing lot in London or Osaka. The score is portable. It travels. And that is precisely why the global coffee trade depends on it.
Cupping vs. Casual Tasting: A Critical Distinction
Most of us taste coffee through the lens of personal preference. We know what we like. We reach for the bag that made us happy last time. We avoid the one that tasted too sour, too bitter, or too flat. That is completely valid as a consumer behavior, but it is not cupping. Cupping is not about whether you personally enjoy a cup. It is a descriptive, repeatable assessment designed to minimize individual bias and produce results that professionals across the supply chain can compare and act on.
This distinction has a practical consequence. A trained cupper might evaluate a coffee and note that it has bright, citrus-forward acidity with a thin body and a clean finish. They might score it at 84 points. That is a professional descriptor, not a personal endorsement. A consumer who hates bright acidity might not enjoy that coffee at all, but that is irrelevant to the score. The score tells you about the coffee. Your preferences tell you about you.
Who uses cupping? Farmers use it to evaluate harvests and processing batches. Mill operators use it to verify that their drying and milling methods are not introducing defects. Importers use it to decide whether a shipment meets contract specifications. Roasters use it to develop roast profiles and confirm consistency between production batches. Q Graders, the licensed sensory professionals we will discuss in Section 4, use it to assign the official scores that move coffee through international trade. The chain is long, and cupping is the common language spoken at every link.
The Historical Role of Tasting in Coffee Culture
Cupping did not emerge from a corporate meeting room in the 1990s. Its roots go back centuries, to the trading ports of Yemen and the merchant houses of the Ottoman Empire, where buyers needed a reliable way to evaluate coffee quality before committing to a purchase. The ritual of brewing coffee in an open bowl and tasting directly from the surface is ancient. What changed over time was the formalization of that ritual into a replicable protocol.
The Specialty Coffee Association, known as the SCA, eventually codified the modern cupping protocol into a standardized form with specific scoring criteria. That form became the global benchmark, adopted by producers, traders, and roasters across more than 60 countries. For more context on how tasting evolved into a cultural and commercial institution, the historical role of tasting in coffee culture offers a detailed look at that arc.
For Kona farmers like us, adopting formal cupping was not just a best practice. It was a necessity rooted in protecting a geographic designation. The Kona name carries legal and commercial weight in Hawaii. It signals origin, quality, and terroir. Maintaining that designation requires a verifiable quality standard, not just a label on a bag. Cupping provides that verification. If you want to understand how the broader quality assurance framework works in the Kona industry, our guide to Kona coffee quality assurance connects those dots in full.
The historical arc from casual tasting to standardized cupping mirrors the evolution of Kona coffee itself: from a local agricultural product to an internationally recognized specialty coffee with a defensible identity. We take that identity seriously, and cupping is one of the primary tools we use to protect it.
The Step-by-Step Cupping Protocol Professionals Follow
Knowing that cupping is controlled and standardized is one thing. Understanding exactly what happens at a professional cupping table, in sequence, is another. The process is surprisingly tactile and sensory-rich. It has a rhythm to it. Once you understand the steps, you will never look at a row of bowls on a table the same way again.
Setup: Grinding, Weighing, and Preparing the Bowls
The SCA cupping protocol calls for a ratio of approximately 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 milliliters of water. That ratio is not negotiable if you want results that are comparable to other professional cuppings. Deviation from the ratio changes the extraction, which changes the flavor, which makes the score meaningless in a comparative context.
Coffee must be ground fresh, immediately before cupping. This is non-negotiable. Ground coffee begins degassing and oxidizing the moment it is exposed to air. Pre-ground coffee, even coffee ground an hour before cupping, has already lost volatile aromatic compounds that contribute to fragrance and flavor scores. The grind size is medium-coarse, coarser than drip but finer than a French press, and it must be consistent. An uneven grind produces uneven extraction, which muddies the results.
Water temperature is set at 93 to 96 degrees Celsius, which is roughly 200 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit. Water that is too cool under-extracts the coffee. Water that is too hot scorches it. Either extreme introduces variables that mask the coffee's true character. The water quality also matters. Mineral content affects extraction. Chlorinated municipal water is avoided in professional settings for the same reason a painter would not use dirty water to mix colors.
Typically, five bowls are prepared per coffee sample. Five bowls is not arbitrary. It is enough to test for uniformity across the batch, which is itself a scored attribute. If four bowls taste clean and bright but one bowl has a ferment note, that inconsistency reveals a problem in the lot that a single-bowl evaluation would have missed. For guidance on how brewing conditions interact with coffee quality more broadly, our resource on best practices for brewing high-quality Kona coffee gives useful context.
The Sensory Sequence: Fragrance, Crust, Aroma, and the First Sip
The cupping sequence begins before a drop of water is added. The dry fragrance evaluation comes first. The cupper leans over each bowl, inhales slowly and deeply, and records their impressions. Dry fragrance captures volatiles that exist in the ground coffee before heat and water change the aromatic profile. Some coffees have an extraordinary dry fragrance that shifts dramatically once water is added. Capturing both is essential.
Water is then poured in a single smooth pour, starting at one end of the table and moving to the other without pausing. The timer starts. As the water hits the grounds, a crust of coffee begins to form on the surface. The wet aroma is evaluated immediately after pouring, before the crust has set. This is the moment when volatile aromatic compounds are most active and accessible.
At four minutes, the crust is broken. This is, without exaggeration, the most dramatic sensory moment in the entire cupping ritual. The cupper inserts a spoon at the front edge of the crust, pushes it gently backward, and leans in to inhale the aroma released as the crust breaks. It is concentrated, complex, and brief. Breaking the crust releases a burst of steam and aroma that offers a window into the coffee's character that you will not get at any other point in the process. After breaking, the foam and remaining grinds are skimmed off the surface with two spoons, leaving clean liquid.
The slurp follows, and it is intentionally loud. Professional cuppers aspirate the coffee forcefully off the spoon, spraying it across the entire surface of the palate in a fine mist. This technique, sometimes called aerosolization, distributes the coffee over taste receptors simultaneously and delivers it to the retronasal passage, where aroma compounds are perceived from inside the mouth. Slurping is not poor manners at a cupping table. It is technique. What you perceive when you slurp a coffee is richer and more complete than what you taste with a gentle sip.
Timing and Temperature: Tasting the Coffee as It Cools
Cupping is not a one-and-done evaluation. Professionals taste the same cups multiple times as the coffee cools, because different attributes emerge and change at different temperature ranges. A coffee that seems flat and unremarkable at high temperature may reveal layered sweetness and complexity at 70 degrees Celsius. A coffee that tastes bright and pleasant hot might develop an unpleasant astringency as it approaches room temperature.
The standard practice is to taste the coffees at three temperature ranges: hot (above 71°C), warm (around 60°C), and cool (below 38°C). Acidity often reads differently when the cup is hot versus cool. Body becomes more perceptible as the temperature drops and the coffee thickens on the palate. Defects that were masked by heat sometimes reveal themselves only in a cooled cup. This is why cupping sessions take time. There is no rushing the cooling process without compromising the evaluation.
At Buddha's Cup, we apply this multi-temperature tasting approach to our Kona cupping sessions because the layered character of our coffee rewards the patience. The flavor notes that make Kona worth its price, the gentle sweetness, the smooth finish, the mild and pleasant acidity, are most fully revealed as the cup cools and the heat stops dominating the palate. This is one of the reasons why Kona coffee is smoother than traditional coffee: its intrinsic qualities, low harsh acidity and refined body, hold up beautifully across the full temperature range of a cupping session.
Tasting for defects and tasting for positive attributes are not separate sessions. They happen simultaneously. A trained cupper scans for off-flavors like ferment, mold, phenol, and earthiness while simultaneously noting the presence or absence of positive descriptors like caramel, stone fruit, chocolate, and floral character. It requires split attention, and it is a skill that develops over hundreds of cupping sessions.
The Ten Attributes Professionals Score on the SCA Sheet
The SCA cupping form assigns scores to ten specific attributes, each rated on a scale that contributes to a maximum possible total of 100 points. Understanding what each attribute measures, and why it matters, transforms the way you read a coffee score. These are not arbitrary categories. Each one captures a distinct and meaningful dimension of coffee quality.
Fragrance/Aroma, Flavor, and Aftertaste
Fragrance and aroma are technically two measurements rolled into one scored attribute. Fragrance refers to the smell of the dry, ground coffee before water is added. Aroma refers to the smell after water is added, including the crust-break moment. Together they tell the evaluator what volatile aromatic compounds are present in the coffee and how expressive the bean's aromatic profile is. A coffee with a dull, undifferentiated fragrance and muted wet aroma will score lower here than one that offers a complex, evolving aromatic experience from dry grounds through wet evaluation.
Flavor is the most holistic score on the sheet. It captures the overall impression of taste and aroma combined in the mouth during the sip. This is where descriptors like chocolate, berry, citrus, caramel, and floral enter the conversation. Flavor is not simply sweetness or bitterness in isolation. It is the complete sensory picture that the coffee paints on the palate. A coffee with beautiful individual notes that do not cohere into a satisfying whole will score less than one where the flavors work together.
Aftertaste measures what remains after the coffee is swallowed. How long does the finish linger? Is it pleasant or harsh? Does it leave a clean, sweet echo or a drying, bitter residue? A long, pleasing aftertaste is a mark of quality. A short or unpleasant finish pulls the score down. Kona's signature smooth, low-bitterness finish is one of the reasons our coffee consistently performs well on this attribute. Exploring the broader territory of flavor nuances in tropical coffee gives you a richer vocabulary for describing what you taste in coffees grown in volcanic, high-altitude tropical environments like ours.
Acidity, Body, and Balance
Acidity is one of the most misunderstood attributes in coffee evaluation, and it is worth taking time to unpack it carefully. In everyday language, people often associate acidity with sourness or stomach upset, and therefore assume low acidity is always better. In professional cupping, acidity is evaluated as brightness, the vibrant, lively quality that gives a coffee energy and liveliness. A coffee with good acidity has a pleasant, sparkling quality. A coffee with excessive or unbalanced acidity tips into sourness and loses points. A coffee with no acidity at all can feel flat and inert. The cupper's job is to assess whether the acidity is appropriate in intensity and pleasant in quality, not simply whether it is present or absent.
Body refers to the physical sensation of weight and texture in the mouth. A full-bodied coffee feels rich and substantial on the palate, almost like cream compared to water. A light-bodied coffee feels thinner and more watery. Neither extreme is inherently better. The evaluation considers whether the body is appropriate to the coffee's other characteristics and whether it contributes to or detracts from the overall experience. Kona coffee tends to have a medium to full body, which contributes to its reputation for richness and satisfaction.
Balance is the attribute that asks whether all of the other scored qualities, acidity, body, flavor, and aftertaste, coexist harmoniously without any one of them dominating or overpowering the others. A coffee with brilliant acidity but no body to anchor it may feel unbalanced. A coffee with tremendous body but no aromatic complexity may feel heavy and dull. Balance rewards coffees that achieve integration across their attributes, and it is one of the most difficult qualities to achieve intentionally. Understanding how to appreciate the flavor profiles of high-quality Kona coffee starts with recognizing how balance operates as the organizing principle of a well-scored cup.
Uniformity, Clean Cup, Sweetness, and Overall
Uniformity measures consistency across all five bowls in a sample. If all five bowls taste the same, that is excellent uniformity and earns a full score of 10 points. If even one of the five deviates from the others, whether due to a processing defect, an inconsistency in drying, or contamination in one portion of the lot, points are deducted. Uniformity is a quality signal about the entire production process. A consistently good lot means the farmer's practices are reliable and repeatable, which is what buyers and roasters need to know.
Clean cup measures the absence of negative impressions. A clean cup is not simply a cup without obvious defects. It is a cup without any interfering negative flavors, faults, or taints at any point from first impression through aftertaste. Off-flavors such as ferment, rubber, mold, and earthiness each result in a deduction. A perfectly clean cup earns 10 points per bowl, with deductions for each bowl that shows any fault. This attribute rewards meticulous processing and storage practices.
Sweetness in this context does not mean you have added sugar. It means the coffee itself registers a perception of sweetness, a quality that reflects well-developed sugars in the bean through proper ripeness at harvest and appropriate processing and roasting. Underripe cherries produce astringent, harsh cups. Over-fermented processing introduces sour or funk notes. When everything is done right, the natural sugars in the coffee cherry translate into a pleasing sweetness in the cup that needs no addition.
Overall is the final scored attribute, and it is distinct from the sum of the other scores. It represents the evaluator's holistic impression: does this coffee move you? Does it deliver something distinctive, memorable, or exceptional beyond what the individual scores might predict? It is a subjective but important recognition that quality is more than the sum of measurable parts. Understanding how these attributes connect to Kona coffee grading helps explain why grade and cup score are related but not identical measures of quality.
How the 100-Point Scale Works and What Scores Mean
The 100-point scale is the most visible output of a professional cupping session, and it is widely misread. Scores are not ratings out of 100 like a school exam where 70 is passing. The scale has specific thresholds with industry-defined meanings, and understanding those thresholds changes how you shop for coffee.
The 80-Point Specialty Threshold and Why It Matters
Scores below 80 points represent commercial grade coffee. This is the coffee that fills most supermarket shelves, most office break rooms, and most fast food drive-throughs. It is not necessarily terrible coffee. It is drinkable, it is consistent, and it is cheap to produce at scale. But it is produced, processed, and evaluated to a commercial standard, not a specialty standard. Defects are tolerated at certain thresholds. Uniformity and cleanliness are good enough rather than exceptional.
At 80 points, a coffee earns the designation of specialty grade. This is the threshold that separates coffees that meet a rigorous quality standard from those that do not. Anything that lands at 80 points or above earns the specialty designation, which carries real commercial consequences. Specialty coffee commands premium pricing. It qualifies for specialty retailer distribution. It becomes eligible for competition lots and micro-roaster attention. The 80-point line is not arbitrary. It represents a verifiable quality threshold that the entire specialty coffee industry agrees on.
From 80 to 84.99 points, coffees are considered specialty grade at the entry level. These are good coffees with identifiable positive attributes and no significant defects. From 85 to 89.99 points, coffees are considered excellent specialty grade, coffees with distinctive character, strong scores across multiple attributes, and consistent performance across the lot. At 90 points and above, coffee is considered exceptional and rare. These are typically single-origin micro-lots from specific plots on specific farms, harvested and processed with extraordinary precision.
In international trade, scores are increasingly procurement criteria rather than marketing language. Many importers now require documented cup scores of at least 80 points before entering a purchasing conversation. A farm that cannot produce a verified score above that threshold is not competing in the specialty market, regardless of how beautiful its packaging looks.
Q Graders: The Licensed Professionals Who Make the Call
Not everyone who cups coffee is qualified to assign a score that carries commercial weight. Q Graders are the licensed sensory professionals who perform official evaluations. Coffee is routinely graded by these licensed professional coffee graders, who score each coffee out of 100 based on a range of sensory categories including acidity, aroma, and body. The Q Grader designation is issued by the Coffee Quality Institute, and earning it requires passing a rigorous multi-part examination that includes sensory tests, blind cuppings, written components, and practical demonstrations of technique.
The exam is intentionally difficult. It tests for the ability to identify specific flavors and defects in blind conditions, to calibrate scores consistently with established standards, and to work accurately and repeatedly under time pressure. Many candidates fail on their first attempt. The pass rate reflects the difficulty of developing the sensory acuity and procedural knowledge that the designation requires.
When multiple Q Graders cup the same lot, their scores are averaged to produce a final number. This consensus approach reduces the influence of individual bias and increases the reliability of the score. A lot that scores 87 from one Q Grader and 89 from another averages to 88, a number that represents the collective professional assessment rather than a single opinion. Research validating cupping methodology has compared SCA, Q-grading, and company-specific methods across large panels of expert tasters and confirmed that the standardized approach produces results that are both reliable and reproducible across different professional contexts.
In Hawaii, the conversation about coffee quality science continues to evolve. The Coffee Research Institute Hawaii is part of that ongoing effort to advance the evidence base for what makes Hawaiian coffee distinctive and how to measure that distinctiveness rigorously.
The SCA CVA Update: Why the Scoring System Is Evolving
The cupping world is not static. The SCA has been moving toward a new framework called the Coffee Value Assessment, or CVA, which represents a philosophical and structural evolution from the original cupping form. The CVA separates descriptive assessment from hedonic, or preference-based, scoring. In the original form, some attributes blended objective description with subjective preference in ways that made scores harder to interpret across different cultural contexts. The CVA is designed to produce more transparent, more separable data about what a coffee is versus how much a particular evaluator likes it.
For Kona farmers, this shift matters. The CVA framework is designed to reward coffees with distinctive, traceable sensory identities. It values what makes a coffee unique to its origin, its terroir, its processing method, and its variety. Kona coffee has a distinctive profile rooted in volcanic soil, specific elevation bands, cloud-patterned shade, and a growing tradition built over more than 150 years. A scoring system that rewards distinctiveness rather than conformity to a generic flavor ideal is a system that plays to Kona's strengths.
At Buddha's Cup, our commitment to specific roast profiles is part of how we express and protect that identity. Understanding what defines the Mokulele Reserve Roast from Buddha's Cup gives you a window into how roast decisions interact with the inherent cupping qualities of the green coffee we start with.
What Cupping Reveals About Kona Coffee Specifically
Everything we have covered so far about cupping protocol and scoring applies universally to all coffee. But cupping does not evaluate coffee in a vacuum. It reveals what the land, the climate, the processing, and the roasting have done to a specific bean. For Kona coffee, that means cupping reveals the specific fingerprint of the Big Island's volcanic slopes. And that fingerprint is worth understanding.
Why Kona's Growing Conditions Show Up in the Cup Score
Holualoa sits at an elevation of approximately 1,400 feet on the western slope of Mauna Loa, in the heart of the Kona coffee belt. The growing conditions here are not incidental to our coffee quality. They are the primary driver of it. The volcanic soil on the Big Island is rich in minerals, porous enough to drain well, and structured in a way that encourages deep root development in the coffee trees. The afternoon cloud cover that rolls in predictably from the ocean acts as natural shade, reducing heat stress on the cherries and slowing their development in a way that deepens sugar accumulation.
The rainfall pattern in Kona is reliable but moderate, delivering enough moisture to support healthy trees without causing the waterlogging that leads to fermentation defects in the cherry. The day and night temperature differential at our elevation is significant, cooling overnight in a way that slows ripening and allows the coffee cherry to develop complexity over a longer growing period. Each of these geographic and climatic factors translates directly into cupping outcomes. The mineral richness of the soil contributes to body and mouthfeel scores. The slow ripening contributes to sweetness and clean cup scores. The natural shade contributes to balanced acidity. The farms that tap into volcanic spring water in Kona coffee production add another layer of mineral character that shows up in the cup.
This is why Kona coffee consistently performs above the 80-point specialty threshold. The growing conditions are not accidental. They are the product of a specific geography that happens to produce exactly what a professional cupper rewards: sweetness, balance, body, clean cup, and a smooth, lingering finish.
How We Cup at Buddha's Cup Farm in Holualoa
We cup our coffee at three key moments in the production cycle. We cup incoming harvest batches as the cherries come off the trees and go through processing, to verify that the fruit quality and processing method are producing the character we expect. We cup after roasting, to confirm that the roast profile we applied to a specific green lot brought out the best in that coffee without pushing it too far or leaving it underdeveloped. And we cup before any coffee is packaged for sale, as a final check that what leaves our farm is what we intended to produce.
The relationship between roast profile and cupping score is closer than most consumers realize. The same green coffee, roasted to two different development levels, will score differently on nearly every attribute. A lighter roast will tend to show higher fragrance and flavor complexity, more pronounced acidity, and a lighter body. A darker roast will show less volatile aromatics, reduced acidity, more body, and a bolder but sometimes more uniform flavor. Getting that decision right requires cupping both options and choosing the profile that best expresses what the green coffee offers.
The impact of brewing techniques on Kona coffee flavor extends this logic into the consumer's kitchen: the way you brew our coffee at home will also affect how the cupping-identified attributes express themselves in your cup. We cup to identify the coffee's potential. How that potential is realized depends partly on what happens after the coffee leaves our farm.
Blending, Labeling, and Why Scores Protect the Consumer
There is a complication in the Kona coffee market that every buyer should understand. Hawaii law permits coffee labeled as Kona blend to contain as little as 10 percent actual Kona coffee, with the remaining 90 percent being coffee from anywhere else in the world. The blend product is then sold at a price point much lower than 100 percent Kona, which appears attractive to cost-conscious buyers but can mislead consumers into thinking they are experiencing Kona coffee quality when they are largely experiencing something else entirely.
Cupping scores are one of the most powerful tools available to protect consumers from this confusion. A professionally scored lot of 100 percent Kona coffee will produce a score that reflects the genuine attributes of Kona origin. A blend product, if subjected to honest cupping, will score differently, because the diluting coffees bring different acidity, body, and flavor profiles that change the cup's character. For a thorough explanation of this labeling issue, our guide on whether Kona coffee can be blended with other beans and still be labeled Kona explains the regulatory landscape in full.
An educated buyer who understands the 100-point scale and what specialty grade means is a buyer who is equipped to make real comparisons. They can ask a seller: what is your cup score? Who scored it? Was it Q Grader verified? Those questions protect buyers and reward honest producers. This transparency is part of why Kona coffee quality justifies its price point when you understand the full picture of what produces that quality.
How to Cup Coffee at Home (The Buddha's Cup Approach)
You do not need a certified cupping lab to explore this practice. With a small amount of basic kitchen equipment and some freshly roasted whole bean coffee, you can conduct a home cupping that teaches you more about coffee quality in one session than months of casual drinking. Here is how we would walk you through it.
What You Need to Start: Equipment and Coffee Selection
The equipment list for a home cupping is simpler than you might expect. You need a kitchen scale that measures in grams. You need a kettle that allows you to control or at least estimate water temperature. You need four to six identical bowls or mugs. You need a timer. You need a wide spoon, the wider and shallower the better, so you can slurp from it effectively. You need a glass of water for palate cleansing between tastes, and a notepad for writing down your impressions.