Cuppings guide app

The Cup­pings guide is an app for iPhone that points the way to excel­lent cof­fee near you based on tast­ings from our inter­na­tion­al net­work of trust­ed experts. It was devel­oped as part of our long­stand­ing fas­ci­na­tion with excel­lent coffee.

Using Cup­pings in the wild

Cup­pings was ini­tial­ly pro­to­typed as a spe­cial­ty cof­fee tast­ing diary. After a cou­ple of iter­a­tions we decid­ed that the audi­ence for such an app would be extreme­ly lim­it­ed. For this rea­son, we turned the app into its present form. The guide builds on our expe­ri­ence drink­ing cof­fee while trav­el­ing the world. The tast­ing aspect found its way into a pen-and-paper tast­ing game.

Ear­ly sketch­es of Cup­pings as tast­ing diary

Ear­ly mock­ups from the pre-iOS7 era

We’ve kept Cup­pings delib­er­ate­ly sparse in both func­tion­al­i­ty and visu­als. This has result­ed in a dis­tinc­tive min­i­mal aes­thet­ic and also reduces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of erro­neous infor­ma­tion being fea­tured in the app. It is opti­mised around around doing just one task real­ly well: find­ing great cof­fee near you.

The sug­ges­tions Cup­pings pro­vides are sourced by our­selves through a com­bi­na­tion of desk research, on-site vis­its and rec­om­men­da­tions from trust­ed sources. The lat­ter being an ever-grow­ing group of peo­ple who find their way to us through dis­cov­ery of the app.

Although the app seems extreme­ly util­i­tar­i­an, it con­tin­ues to be a joy for us to work on thanks to its light­ness. There is play­ful­ness here, but it hap­pens around the app: using it to find a delight­ful cof­fee spot in a for­eign city, argu­ing with us on Twit­ter about which of your favourite spots should be includ­ed, and (for us) tak­ing a few hours out of our busy sched­ules every once in a while to tweak and to tune.

Cup­pings is active­ly main­tained and avail­able for pur­chase on the App Store.