Green coffee summit 2023
Part 1
Extrinsic attributes
For nowadays it is quite common to get some info about the coffee you buy, especially high quality lots, which usually go along with nice description of a farm, variety, processing and so on. It is common but not compulsory.
From the perspective of green buyer or roaster if the information is not provided to you or you don't have any form to put this data and redistribute or share, it eventual get lost on the way within supply chain. The practice is that industry got use to current cupping score system which stays valid for some level, but has no options to keep the data except sensory analysis.
Should we keep all the data beside sensory in cupping form and why it might be valuable for specialty coffee?
Lets recollect what we actually consider as specialty coffee.
According to current formal definition in industry, specialty coffee is what we can find between 80-100 of a grading scale.
With new CAS SCA suggests to revisit and update the way we consider the value, introducing so called "attributes continuum" which reflect the real value by accumulating all the attributes coffee has, more attributes means more value, and more special the coffee is.
You all do perfectly know how appreciable is to give full information about coffee in competitions and it really what does coffee unique.
The numeric score itself do not tell us any story and do not open any specifics about coffee although is representing a quality as value, but many non-sensory attributes left behind.
So the idea is to keep all the attributes separately and in structured way to make it easier to find the coffee you need, to help you choose what you really value, according not just on sensory impression.
As you can see with statistics, huge percentage is willing to know about additional information about coffee beside flavor description.
To make possible to keep this additional data available SCA came up with the following alpha version of extrinsic attribute form:
It is limited with several options but "other" section is also present to make you own notes.
Here is a graph of importance of the attributes according to more than 500 polled representatives of supply chain.
For now the extrinsic form is still under development and in 2024 a new beta version will be released with incorporated updates. There are still much uncertainty about what specific attribute should be included and how much value they will represent, taking into consideration that the feedback is quite diverse.
Here, for example, you can see the representation of "organic" attribute importance among the poll participants
If you already saw a new beta version of CVA which is available here (if you don't highly recommend to take a look) you might notice that it's quite a massive reading with lots of specifics but still the questions remains.
As the industry already has some experience with sensory and physical evaluation and can tie approximately this data with the value in terms of quality, but with the extrinsic attributes the situation is more unclear as the whole value term is quite abstract and corellate differently with these attributes.
The only thing for sure is that extrinsic attributes are vital for building what we call sustainability in specialty coffee. Even if it has become a profiteering term but the real intention behind it still stands for equatable value distribution, ethical and ecological sourcing and encouraging economic and social practices. It is important to understand these fundamentals and dive deep into it to discover and bring up a real value.
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