You take a sip of coffee and think: pretty good. Then the person next to you takes a sip of the exact same cup and says something like "oh, that's so bright — almost like a green apple kind of acidity." You nod along, quietly wondering if everyone else got handed a sense you missed out on. You didn't. You just haven't been given the right exercise yet.
A 46-Person Race to Find the Different Cup
In May 2026, 46 of the most trained palates in the world gathered in Bangkok for the World Cup Tasters Championship — one of specialty coffee's strangest and most demanding competitions. The format sounds almost too simple: three cups arrive in a triangle. Two are poured from the exact same coffee. One is different. The taster's only job is to find the odd cup out, as many times as possible, as fast as possible.
After three days of preliminary rounds, quarterfinals, and semifinals, Vietnam's Le Quang Cuong — known in the coffee world as "Nicky" — took the title, correctly identifying seven out of eight final triangles in three minutes and thirty-five seconds. He beat finalists from Switzerland, the United States, and Japan, and became the first Vietnamese competitor ever to win the championship.
It's a fun headline. But the more useful story is what the competition is actually testing — because it has almost nothing to do with what most beginners assume separates "coffee people" from everyone else.
The Skill Isn't Vocabulary. It's Noticing.
Cup Tasters competitors aren't asked to name flavor notes or write elegant tasting descriptions. They're not graded on whether they can say "this has a juicy, blackberry-like acidity" — they're graded on whether they can tell that two cups are different at all. That distinction matters, because it's the exact thing that quietly intimidates a lot of people who are curious about specialty coffee but feel like outsiders to it: the assumption that your opinion doesn't count until you've learned the vocabulary.
The world's best tasters prove the opposite. Noticing a difference comes first. The words for describing it come later — if they come at all. You can be genuinely good at this skill years before you're confident naming what you're tasting.
Why This Matters Even If You'll Never Compete
Taste differences — acidity, sweetness, body, how long a flavor lingers — are much easier to detect side by side than in isolation. Taste one coffee on its own and it mostly just registers as "coffee." Taste two back to back, and your palate suddenly has something to measure against. The differences start announcing themselves without you having to go hunting for them.
This is also a good moment to retire a common myth: acidity isn't a flaw to push through. That brightness — the thing that can taste almost citrusy or fruit-like — is one of the clearest signals that you're tasting real, high-quality specialty coffee rather than something flatter and more generic. Competitors aren't trying to avoid it. They're trying to notice it precisely.
Try It Yourself: A Two-Cup Tasting Exercise
You don't need a competition floor or a flavor wheel to practice this. You need two coffees and about five minutes.
- Pick two coffees that are likely to differ — a lighter roast next to a darker one, or two different origins, works well for a first try.
- Brew them the same way. Same ratio, same water temperature, same brew time. The only variable should be the coffee itself.
- Taste one, then the other, then go back to the first one again. Going back and forth matters more than getting it "right" the first time.
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Ask yourself three simple questions instead of reaching for tasting notes:
- Which one feels heavier or thicker in your mouth?
- Which one is brighter or more sour right up front?
- Which one's flavor sticks around longer after you swallow?
There's no wrong answer here. You're training attention, not memorizing a vocabulary list.
How the Pros Actually Train This Skill
Here's the most surprising part: a lot of competitive coffee tasters don't train by drinking more coffee. Lok Chan, the 2017 World Cup Tasters Champion, has talked about how he and his team at Hong Kong's Craft Coffee actually train with fruit candy and gummies on purpose. The logic is simple — a lot of fruit candy tastes remarkably close to the actual fruit notes that show up in coffee, and not everyone has easy access to fresh mangosteen or prickly pear depending on where they live. So instead, they taste their way through a bag of gummies, paying close attention to what makes cherry taste different from raspberry, or green apple different from pear, and build a mental reference library from there.
It's a genuinely easy thing to try yourself: next time you're eating fruit gummies, slow down for a few pieces and actually notice what's distinct about each flavor — the sourness, the sweetness, how long it lingers. That's the same sensory skill at work when someone tastes "blackberry" or "green apple" in a cup of coffee. It just got trained somewhere a little more colorful than a cupping table.
Many competitors also simplify their diet dramatically in the weeks before a championship — cutting spicy food, excess salt and sugar, sometimes alcohol — so nothing else is competing for their attention when it counts. And several top finishers describe trusting their first impression rather than deliberating: tasting once, deciding, and moving on, instead of circling back and second-guessing.
None of that is necessary to enjoy your own coffee more. But it's a good reminder that the "gift" some people seem to have for tasting is mostly just hours of deliberate, repeated practice — sometimes with a coffee cup, sometimes with a bag of gummy bears.
