Defining “specialty Coffee”
What is specialty coffee?
First, it’s worth noting note that specialty coffee is a very small subset of an absolutely MASSIVE industry, and Specialty coffee only comprises about 10 or 20% of the total coffee market. The vast majority of coffee on the market is what we call “commercial quality”.
In general, when we say “specialty coffee”, we mean
high-quality coffee
coffee that was ethically sourced and fully traceable back to it’s origin
There’s no certification or governing body regulating these qualifications, except for CQI and its corps of Q Graders trained in quality evalaution.
As a Q Grader and Instructor, I spend a lot of my time cupping coffees and deciding whether or not they’ve reached “specialty”. In order to achieve this quality designation, the coffee must:
Have a cup score higher than 80 points
Have zero cup defects
Have 0 primary and less than 5 secondary green defects
This is the stuff that I train cuppers on when they become Q Graders - how to correctly evaluate coffee of all different qualities in calibration with a global community of experts.
It’s important to note that in the world of specialty coffee, the higher the quality of the coffee, the higher the price. What I mean here is that a coffee that tastes like blueberries and swiss chocolate should fetch a higher price than one that tastes like cigarette ash and mold.
That means that quality evaluation basically equals price discovery. It also means that if a producer doesn’t know the quality of their coffee, it can be very easy for them to receive unfairly low prices for their lots. And that, my friends, is why I think that everyone in this industry needs to be trained in sensory evaluation in coffee.
