Скачать или смотреть What is Specialty Coffee? | How to Grade and Rate Coffee

The difference in coffee is significant. What makes a specialty coffee special?
Learn how to take the guesswork out of discovering coffee that is superb, instead of just overpriced.

What is Specialty Coffee

Today, we’ll answer the question many coffee aficionados ask - “What is specialty coffee?”

That's a term that we hear quite a bit. And do people actually know what it is probably not. So what the term can be, and what the term especially coffee tries to communicate is the level of quality of the coffee.

So coffee, taste-wise is scored on a scale from zero to 100. And it's similar to wine and it sort of borrows a lot of those ideas.

Specialty Coffee - How It Is Graded and Ranked

Coffee with an 8200 range on taste ends up being classified as specialty coffee. So that seems like a pretty wide band like a 20 point band. But in reality, the last statistic I was reading was about 3% of all of coffee that's grown is considered a specialty coffee quality.

So really there is a small market of growers that participate in the specialty coffee industry. Yet, it's a niche that's growing at like 20% per year it's going gangbusters.

So that's a lot of the reasons why there's a price differential between stuff you find at your like regular chain store, grocery store, and what you find in especially coffee, retail location at a coffee shop or a roastery.

It's just a small supply and a huge growing demand every single year, year over year.

Spilling the Beans on What Makes Coffee Special

When it comes to specialty coffee, many factors come into play such as the amount of rainfall, the amount of sunlight, the nutrients in the soil, how clean is the farm like how well do the farmers take care of the land?

Is it the harvest the first pick, the second pick the third pick? All of those picks are going to have different levels of ripeness, just like if you're picking cherries out or tomatoes out of the back of your garden.

Now regarding the taste, that is more what's on the 80 to 100 point scale, the taste is coordinated or just judged by a qualified coffee taster, they're called Q graders. So a Q grader has gone through a series of classes to hone their taste buds and learn what all these like nuances are.

Coffee Tasters, Coffee Tasting Wheel, and Coffee Flavour

Many of you have probably seen or heard of the coffee flavor wheel, Q graders take base a lot of their tastes off of the coffee flavor wheel.

When Q graders take in a coffee or coffee, they are looking for things, they're actually looking for defects. Such as whether a cup is moldy, if it's sort of tainted, if it's off flavor just a little bit if it's over fermented, if it's metallic, if there's not a lot of sweetness, all of these things play into the Q grader score.

So the coffee has to pass that agricultural grading and it has to pass the coffee tasting or the coffee cupping.

There are also different types of trends within the specialty coffee industry, and they do play into how coffee is scored, how it's perceived by Q graders, how it's perceived by judges, and the price of a coffee will fluctuate based on some of those trends. So that's like one thing that you sort of have to keep in mind with specially coffee is - there are trends or an ebb and flow about taste preferences within this extremely narrow niche within the coffee world.

Yep, Coffee Tasting is A Bit Like Wine Tasting!

So that's just kind of one of those things. Wine is exactly the same way. All the same agricultural factors playing into it. Same trends, same human perceptions, same, like ostentatious attitudes. and stuff like that. So coffee in a lot of respects is exactly like that.

I hope you learned from this and I’ll catch you again in the next one!