3 ways to improve alignment & calibration

Building and maintaining alignment with your coffee tasting panel is crucial. From producers talking to buyers to roasters collaborating with baristas, it takes persistent effort to work towards building better communication and mutual understanding.

Here are three easy exercises to improve alignment and clearer communication with your team:

1.Taste lots of coffee

Sounds easy, right? Keep doing what you’re doing; taste coffee at the cupping table, behind the espresso bar, or during your morning pourover. Create more opportunities to share coffee with team mates and - most importantly - talk about your experience.

Cup together often, and be sure to host discussions immediately after the cupping. Go over everyone’s descriptive notes, and get curious about what attribute they’re describing with specific words. Did you experience that same flavor, but ascribe a different word to it? This is how we build alignment. 

2. Calibrate on non-coffee flavors

Calibration exercises without coffee can be beneficial for expanding our own palates, and for connecting with others' understanding of certain flavors. Taking coffee out of the equation allows us to focus on this one flavor, and think about how our perception might be colored by our preferences. 

This is a fun exercise to do with fruits, oils, spices, teas, chocolate, herbs - really anything you like! Spend time pulling each flavor and experience apart - what does a blood orange taste like? How does it differ from a mandarin or a navel? Which is your favorite, and which do others prefer? 

3. Calibrate the entire team to objective standards

In the coffee industry, we are lucky to have tools that help us calibrate to an objective standard. Kits like Le Nez du Cafe, ScentOne, FlavorActiv, and even tasting organic acids can be highly instructive. Going through these exercises together in a dedicated session is the best way to learn. 

Take time to evaluate your own experience and the precise words, feelings, or memories that come up for you when presented with a specific flavor or aroma before sharing with the team. This allows you to get more familiar with your own palate before building bridges of communication towards other cupper’s experiences. 

It all starts with discussion.

The key to building panel alignment is communication. Each time we discuss the flavor notes found in an espresso with the barista, or talk about nuances in different batches with a roaster - even when we talk about the spices we’re detecting in a certain pastry! - we are building alignment with the people in our community. 

Ready to host a calibration session? Contact me to create a training experience tailored to your team!