Did you know “specialty” can also be spelled “speciality“?
I was pleased to learn this, after I made a typo on thousands of packaging boxes. Coincidentally, “spelled” can also be spelled/spelt “spelt”. Classic.
Roasters throw around the word specialty/speciality a lot in coffee, but what does it really mean and why should you care about it? With sky high coffee prices, and loads of brands of coffee on the market, it’s pretty hard to make sense of coffee quality from a marketing perspective, so I thought I could share our side of the story.
According to the Specialty Coffee Association:
Coffee that is scored 80+ on the 100 point grading scale is considered a specialty coffee. Coffee is scored on a few attributes like:
- Defect count. Mouldy, broken, under-ripe, insect damaged. Ok, makes sense.
- Sweetness. Subjective, but carry on.
- Acidity. Perceived acidity, not measured Ph..
- Aroma (ummmm…)
- Body…
- Flavour (ok what?)
These are some defect examples.
This is what the Specialty Coffee Cupping Form looks like.
This is the textbook definition, designed for industry professionals like coffee growers, professional graders, importers and roasters. But as the saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s double shot cappuccino with 2 sugars. And if you asked 100 people to grade the same coffee, you’d get a pretty wide range of scores.
Ironically, those buying the coffee usually score coffee lower than those selling it.
So if the scoring is so subjective and for the supply chain, why do we use it?
Because it’s a minimum standard, it is easy for us to communicate.
In reality, most of our coffees sit in the 83-86 range. There are outliers, or 87+ coffees that we offer in the filter roast range but they come with the price tag to match it. For example if we take the score provided to us for a couple Ethiopian coffees we’ve purchased before:
- Guji, Chebega, Natural, 87.25 points.
- Yirgacheffe, Konga Wete, Washed, 86 points.
Compared to say a more intense and rich coffee roasted for maximum body:
- Brazil, Yellow Catuai, Natural, 82-83 points.
- Guatemala, Nacimientos, Washed, 84 points.
Coffee grading starts at origin. Sorting by hand from the trees, picking only ripe cherries, to sorting by bean size and removing foreign objects like rocks and sticks.
You can see there is a sizable difference in the scoring. But the majority of coffee drinkers are enjoying the more intense and rich coffees at home (i.e lower textbook score), because they are better suited to home coffee machines, and milky flat whites. So to avoid complex scoring expectations, and grading that has no real relevance to the real world application of coffee in the home, we keep it simple and guarantee: all our coffees are 80+ specialty grade, and we source coffees not cause of their score, but cause of their traceability, general vibe 1-10, and the social impact at origin.
We can get into that another time.
Matt