Understanding Coffee Quality and Cupping Scores

Firstly, What is specialty coffee? Specialty coffee is the name for a coffee that ranks very high in quality. Out of a total score of 100, Specialty coffee starts at a minimum of 85.

A cupping score between 80-84 is still considered premium coffee but should not be labelled 'Specialty'.

Unfortunately, the industry lets its consumers down again by incorrectly using Specialty coffee as a generic description for all single origin coffee or fancy looking cafes. Have you ever wondered why your coffee bag never has the cupping score on it, when it's probably the single best way of differentiating coffees?

Imagine if you could look at coffees online and clearly see cheaper coffees with cupping scores of 60 and expensive coffees with 85+ scores? Wouldn't that make it immediately easier to decide on what to buy? So, why don't a lot of shops use this grading?

I actually do not know the answer, but it's probably to do with marketing. Maybe flavour descriptions like "Maple Syrup, Persian fairy floss, Apple pie & Raisin toast" help sell a coffee more than some meaningless numbers to an unwitting customer. The irony is that most flavour descriptions are embellished at best and made up at worst. What's more, when you make espresso coffee and add milk and/or sugar, the flavours will be nothing like any of the descriptions on the bag! If someone tells you they taste notes of blueberry and pomegranate in a flat white, they either have an overactive imagination or a flat out lying.

We'll get back to flavours in a bit, but I first want you to understand how coffee is graded to create a cupping score.

Firstly, you need to understand what cupping is: Cupping is a process of taking freshly roasted coffee (I'm talking either same-day or within a day or two) and grinding it semi-coarsely, placing a precise amount in a cup 8.25g (0.291 oz), adding a precise amount of perfectly heated water 150mL (5.1 fl oz) at 92°-96°C (195°-205°F), then letting it cool until it's almost cold and finally slurping it like a soup so that it sprays over the back of your palate.

When you've cupped a million or so times you'll pick up subtle nuances in the coffee and you can map them out into 10 categories:

Uniformity

Complexity

Brightness

Clean cup

Flavour

Sweetness

Body

Finish/Aftertaste

(These last two categories are actually mapped out prior to slurping)

Each category is given a number from 1-10 and then the total score is adjusted for personal taste to give a total cupping score between 1-100.

An example of a cupping score looks like this:

A lot of the supermarket or mass-produced coffees are between 65-75 so no matter how well you make it, the coffee is only designed to deliver the caffeine at a low cost and sacrifices the taste to do so.

That's why coffee can cost you as little as $20/kg in a supermarket and as much as $300/kg on the specialty market. It's not the same quality!

And you get what you pay for.