Cupping Notes from the Genuine Origin Team

3 min readOct 21, 2016

At Genuine Origin, we’re always cupping — at farms, at mills, at warehouses and with roasters across the United States. (We’ve even got a mobile cupping station in Honduras that travels from farm to farm.)

Below are some recent notes from our U.S. team. Though, you never have to take our word for it—we offer free samples of everything in our store. We hope you’ll order a few, roast them up — and share your own notes.

Cubulco, Guatemala

Usually I gravitate toward bright coffees with big flavors, where the taste is almost a distinctive color or musical note. Cubulco has never been that for me. But every time I cup it (most recently, with the good folks at Irving Farm, in New York’s Hudson Valley) the body on this coffee just makes me incredibly happy. It’s like cashew butter from the jar — or even better, on a graham cracker. Big and so, so creamy.

I’d love to taste this as the core component in an espresso blend. Paired with a snappier, more colorful coffee, it would be the espresso equivalent of the very best kind of peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

— Teresa von Fuchs, Sales and Marketing director, Oct. 17, 2016

Ripe yellow Caturra, in Cubulco, Guatemala.

Monte Alto, Costa Rica

I had the honor of cupping with our friends Dan and Zac at Dagger Mountain in Valparaiso, Indiana, and the Monte Alto really jumped off the table.

We also had coffees from Guatemala, Honduras and Kenya on the table — all of which performed well — but the Monte Alto really surprised us and broke through our preconceived notions about coffees from Costa Rica. A surprising lemony brightness was followed by a really juicy body, reminiscent of apricot, and a pleasant flavor profile with notes of banana and walnut. It had a very nice complexity that put smiles on all our faces.

— Richard Futrell, regional partnership manager, Oct. 11, 2016

Francis Njogu, preparing a cupping at a Volcafe mill in Nairobi, Kenya.

AA Kiriani, Kenya

Anodyne Coffee, in Milwaukee, hosted me for a cupping and … notable on the table for all us was the AA Kiriani. It’s a very complex coffee that represented everything great about clean processed Kenyan coffees: It was light and bright, had fruit-forward flavors with hints of ripe mango and tangerine, and classic green tomato umami notes with ripe tomato savoriness emerging as the coffee cooled.

We all kept returning to this one throughout the cupping, shaking our heads with raised eyebrows, mumbling, “That Kiriani, wow …”

— Richard Futrell, regional partnership manager

AB Yara

The AB Yara is one of our newest Kenyan microlots, and I had the opportunity to cup it in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with the folks at Nobletree. This coffee really stood out on a table of Kenyans and was more reminiscent, for me, of an Ethiopian coffee — floral, tea-like, bright acidity but incredibly balanced. I got notes of pink grapefruit, jasmine, lemonade, star fruit. It was a little tannic and clean on the finish. My favorite on the table!

— Jess Hobbs, Client Services, Oct. 13, 2016

A quality control class for farmers, at the Busulani station, in Mt. Elgon, Kenya.

AA Ndurutu

I absolutely love the body on the AA Ndurutu: huge and really round and clean, with a slightly sweet finish. It had a hint of the savory but was really well balanced with sweetness, like a green tomato jam, and was rich and complex. I also got a little clove, lime, vanilla and juicy ripe orange in there as well.