‹ Back

SCA coffee value assessment

 

    Introduction

 

        Current evaluation approach

 

Every time speaking about coffee quality we refer to our personal perception and experience. From the regular consumer's perspective it might reflect the cultural, geographical and social specifics of the group it belongs to. But is there a universal tool to measure the quality taking into consideration all the preference diversities?

In the world of specialty coffee professionals of industry built a standard to fulfill the request of the community to establish some ranking system to evaluate coffee.

 

Specialty Coffee Association, started in 2017  as a union of SCA of America and SCA of Europe,  plays a foundational role in navigating the way the industry evolve by introducing new approaches of educating, standardizing and integrating the social, economical  and ethical values.

 

For today SCA has been established 2 common protocols, which are spreadly used among coffee professionals, to evaluate the quality of green coffee and decide whether or not it could be considered as specialty coffee. You can find both here

 

The first one is green coffee grading protocol  - it includes the description of all  green coffee defects and  permissible quantity  for specialty coffee.

 

The second one is a score cupping form and its purpose is to evaluate coffee in 100 point scale by specific sensory attributes.

 

Both protocols have been used for years but now evolving industry requires more granular and renewed approach to meet the specifics of new waves.

        Drawbacks and limitations of current approach.

 

If you are not familiar with coffee q-score system or evaluation cupping form, you still may have seen the score points on coffee bags or description on web sites.

 

It may look like this:

 

The main point is to give any quality information about product in order to help the customer to make a choice.

This is the part where it becomes tricky: the q-score itself represent a subjective and objective evaluation, for instance "overall" section is totally subjective and flavor score may vary depending on personal cupper preferences.

 

The second point is that current SCA score system honestly does not centralized much around descriptive analysis, if you saw the score sheet you may noticed that there is even no much space for this data, and generally all this information plays secondary role in resulting numeric q score. Eventually this data rarely well described or structured, sometimes even skipped by cuppers.

 

 

As a  result we end up with descriptive attributes on the last stages of the chain, and it's objectivity might be compromised by marketing tricks or lack of cuppingr skill in roastery.

 

The cupping form can contain so much data but eventually returns just a numeric score which does not  reflect the whole shades of quality.

 

Beside the quality there is much more in coffee that we love, or might love if we aware of the story it brings.

 

That is why every peace of information along the coffee seed journey is so important, it helps to create a deep narrative, and point out the values which are shared among all the participants of the chain, like fare trade, equitable value distribution, transparency, sustainability and much more.

 

SCA Coffee Value Assessment

 

For the last several years SCA was developing new system which main idea is to fit the needs of industry, described as following:  "enhanced usefulness for the community;
congruency with sensory science; and transparency in the approach to discover a
coffee’s value for a specific buyer by offering a way to compare the attributes of a
specific coffee with the desirable attributes outlined by a buyer."

 

For now the  document is known as SCA coffee value assessment and available on the web site. It is still the BETA version but most of the ideas, principles and protocols are declared and  described.

 

So, what is it about?

 

SCA introduces "attribute" term which help to understand and measure the values of  physical assessment coffee. Instead of binary (commercial/specialty) system SCA encourage to see coffee as a spectrum where the specific coffee lot is placed according to the amount of known attributes and their data. The more attributes with higher quality data it has, more value this coffee is worth.

 

All attributes are basically is what consumer aficionados and coffee professionals love in coffee, and it goes far beyond the q-score sheet.

 

Although it sound simple but there could be lots of interpretations of quality due to diversity of preferences among coffee lovers, for example, there is, no doubt,  differences in desirable   flavors for consumers in various parts of the world. So the idea is to point out more attributes, which will give us more objective picture of coffee quality based not only on flavor but also on other valued properties.

 

There are four types of attributes, each of them is described in its own assessment list.

Physical assessment - intrinsic attributes of green coffee, describing physical state of coffee (color, size, moisture content etc).

 

Descriptive assessment - sensory attributes, defined by flavor wheel and based on sensory science

Affective assessment -  sensory attributes of coffee quality scored according to a cupper or market preferences

Extrinsic assessment - additional information about coffee like region, farm, altitude, story behind

 

Lets try to uncover some  important principles within the assessments and give some comments.

 

    Assessment attributes

        Descriptive Assessment.

 

These attributes give us the understanding of flavor profile based on objective references to SCA coffee flavor wheel and Sensory Lexicon

 

The main idea here is to provide an objective  data regarding the product with standardized list of descriptors and the quantity value of intensity, on which each flavor is perceived.

 

First of all the Sensory Lexicon is the thing to read ASAP as it gives a good references and practices to develop and improve your own perception within the scientific standards.

 

Here I see a great step toward uniformity of perception and describing coffee. I like the idea to use intensity scale for flavors which can help with describing the overall balance and the idea to stick with finite number of common descriptors contrary to infinite exotic notes, which suits more a marketing needs.  Though I truly believe that we don't need these  clickbate sparkling  fancy words on the coffee bag for consumers as well, I see consumers of a specialty coffee as,  mostly, conscious people and hope they don't need to be treated with such a provocative approach. No one, disappointed once by not finding  wild flavor notes from the bag of  your coffee, will come to you again with the same loyalty.

 

Even though a new SCA descriptive assessment  can not tell why we have the exact flavor compound detected but it guarantee at least an accurate and full list of flavors , this data can be saved and analysed afterwards to provide key references for scientific researches and give us a glue for some complex processes in the cycle of this fascinating product.

 

I hope these assessment attributes  can help roasters to choose coffee blindly by flavor profile with much more confidence and asurance, especially beginners who are on the start of their coffee journey and don't have easy access for greens or much experience in evaluating.  

 

What I find limiting  or challenging in the assessment is the necessity to standardize the roasting approach for the evaluation.

It is clear that different roast levels, even lightly divers, will result in different intensity and overall flavor composition. More developed will shift to ripe caramelized and less developed to more fruity/floral/grassy.

It is still not clear for me  if we need such accurate description of flavor profile when it is just the representation of one specific roast which might not describe all flavor of the specific coffee beans.

 

        Affective assessment

 

Affective attributes is a very interesting part of evaluation as it gives us though subjective but essential information of how a human perceives the beverage in Hedonic scale. Simply speaking, does he like it and how much on scale from 1 to 10. It also takes into consideration how well the  the product suits the specific market, defined by the evaluator based on his  knowledge and experience.

 

Again, It reflects simply and subjectively how a person responses emotionally to a flavor stimulus or if it can suits the specific market/consumer part.

 

It is indeed quite reasonable and remind me a daily life situation when you ask your more experienced friend to recommend a good bottle of wine for dinner. You have a certain level of trust and assume that this person knows you well enough to tell what you might like.

 

Still the subjunctivness of the perception, especially the diversity of bitter compound affections  on taste buds (which is well explored scientifically) leaves some room for doubts. But as we know this is just a layer of the whole picture and may contribute as much as you decide to the final value, but surely need to be mentioned.
 
        Extrinsic assessment

 

Extrinsic attributes are new items for evaluation procedure and yet there is  no understanding of how it should be effectively incorporated although we  definitely see nowadays that the corresponding narratives of the coffee plays a huge role in buying decisions for roasters who try to emphasize and express their attitude to curtain values in ethical, economical and social perspectives like fair-trade, women empower, eco-friendly farming and many other.

 

Maintaining the traceability of these stories is crucial as it gives not only the possibility to support and appreciate the  quality of good coffee but also create a new value by learning, attaching and feeling involved in hole chain, sharing the whole narrative and knowing what you've chosen to support.

 

Conclusion

 

To sum up I just want to point out the idea of how valuable for me to see the sparkles of new shapes of  coffee industry in its evolution,  and I would like to thanks people, who direct it to this path, gently and wisely setting up the points of this route, emphasizing the worth of equitability and transparency,  conscious consuming and appreciating hard and skillful labor.

 

To my mind new value assessment tool is a great initiative, and I highly recommend to explore it and would definitely do it myself.

 

Still much is under research and development, but the path is declared and I encourage everyone who love coffee to investigate this  new field of knowledge to be on edge.

 

See you in new publishes with more deep dive into this.

 

Sources:
Understanding Value in Coffee | Green Coffee Summit 2022
Sensory Lexicon
SCA coffee flavor wheel
SCA coffee value assessment