Article: Tradition in the cup.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: David Lyman

DETROIT _ They call it cupping.

It's the coffee world's equivalent to wine tasting, the defining moment when roasters decide which coffee beans make the cut and which ones don't.

The faces around the 130-year-old cupping table in the Highland Park, Mich., office of Becharas Brothers Coffee Co. have changed many times since the company was founded 90 years ago.

But almost everything else about the process has been frozen in time, nearly unchanged since coffee became one of the world's major commodities more than 300 years ago.

Dean Becharas Sr., the 69-year-old patriarch of southeast Michigan's oldest ...

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