What makes a coffee specialty coffee

What is specialty coffee, exactly?

A coffee earns the name specialty coffee when trained tasters, following a shared protocol, give it 80 points or more out of 100 on the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) scale. It sounds clinical. In practice it involves a lot of cups, a lot of spoons and a surprising amount of loud slurping.

The assessment happens in two stages. First, the green coffee, the raw bean before roasting, is checked for defects. Then a sample is roasted and tasted. Plenty of coffees are perfectly pleasant and still fall short; what gets one over the line is good beans, a careful harvest and careful processing, all at once.

Quality starts long before the cup. Plant variety, climate, the altitude the coffee grows at, picking only ripe cherries and how they are dried all leave a mark. Roasting and brewing can show off a great coffee, but they can't add what the bean never had.

How it's judged: cupping

Cupping is the industry's standard way of comparing coffees on equal terms. It works because it strips out variables: same roast, same grind, same coffee-to-water ratio for every sample on the table.

1. The sample is roasted light to medium, so nothing gets masked.
2. It's ground coarse and smelled dry. That's the fragrance.
3. Hot water, around 93 °C (about 200 °F), goes straight onto the grounds.
4. After a few minutes a crust forms; tasters break it with a spoon and lean in for the aroma.
5. Once the cups cool a little, the coffee is slurped hard off the spoon so it sprays across the whole palate.
6. Several cups of each sample are tasted, and notes are taken as the coffee cools.

Yes, the slurping is part of the method. At a cupping table, the quiet sipper is the odd one out.

The attributes tasters score

The classic SCA cupping form splits the score across a set of attributes, each covering a different part of the experience:

• Fragrance and aroma: what you pick up through the nose, dry and wet.
• Flavor: the main impression in the mouth, the part we describe as chocolate, citrus or berries.
• Aftertaste: what lingers after you swallow, and for how long.
• Acidity: the coffee's brightness; done well it reads as fruit, not vinegar.
• Body: the weight and texture on your tongue.
• Sweetness: natural sweetness, no sugar involved.
• Balance: how the attributes work together, with none drowning out the rest.
• Uniformity and clean cup: every cup tastes the same, with nothing off.
• Overall: the taster's verdict on the coffee as a whole.

The total places a coffee in a band: 80 to 84.99 is very good, 85 to 89.99 is excellent, and 90 and above is outstanding. Below 80 you'll find plenty of honest everyday coffee, it just isn't specialty grade.

In recent years the SCA introduced a new evaluation system, the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), which separates describing a coffee from judging it. Even so, the 80-point mark from the classic form is still the benchmark most people know.

Defects: points lost before anyone tastes

Before cupping, graders inspect a 350 g sample of green coffee. To qualify as specialty, it can contain no primary defects at all and only a handful of secondary ones, five full defects at most.

Primary defects are the ones that can ruin a cup in tiny amounts: black beans, sour beans, moldy beans, or foreign matter like stones and twigs. Secondary defects include broken beans, insect damage and unripe beans. Those unripe ones tend to become *quakers*, pale beans that refuse to roast properly and taste flat and papery.

Many defects trace back to harvesting and drying, which is why processing, whether washed, natural or honey, has such a big say in the final score.

Freshness: a score is a snapshot

A cupping score describes the coffee on the day it was tasted. After roasting, aromatics fade gradually; once the beans are ground, that fade speeds up dramatically. A brilliant coffee stored badly can end up tasting like very little.

That's why we stick to whole beans and a medium roast, which lets the origin come through instead of hiding it behind bitterness. If you want your beans to last, here's how to store coffee beans at home. For a good after-dinner cup, a few things are worth checking:

• The bag names the country and, ideally, the region.
• It shows a roast date, not just a best-before date.
• It's whole bean, ground right before brewing.
• It's kept sealed, away from light, heat and moisture.