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What Are the Ways to Learn About Specialty Coffee? What Is Specialty Coffee? Where Is the Best Place to Learn About Coffee?

Published: 2026-01-27 Author: FrontStreet Coffee

Last Updated: 2026/01/27, Coffee is almost ubiquitous in our daily lives. Ordering a cup of coffee in a coffee shop creates an interaction with coffee. However, if you want to truly understand coffee, you'll find it difficult to find an entry point. FrontStreet Coffee has had the privilege of learning about a friend A's introduction to coffee experience, so we plan to use his experience as a blueprint, along with market conditions, to analyze some common introductory methods for everyone.

Coffee is a common sight in our daily lives. When we order a cup of coffee in a café, we interact with it. However, if you want to truly understand coffee, you'll find it challenging to find a starting point.

FrontStreet Coffee has had the privilege of learning about a friend's coffee journey, and intends to use his experience as a blueprint to analyze the pros and cons of some common entry points into coffee, based on current market conditions.

Friend A's Coffee Journey

A question had troubled A for a long time: what exactly counts as getting started with coffee? Is it learning how to drink coffee? Learning how to brew coffee? Or knowing about coffee knowledge? To this day, he still doesn't know the answer.

Even A himself isn't clear why he chose the path of coffee. He only remembers that when he reached his senior year of college, at that transitional moment of leaving campus and entering society, like many graduates, he was filled with confusion about the future. Until one day, he made his career plan and resolutely embarked on the path of learning coffee.

Even with a clear goal, the question remained: where to begin? Through consultations, A learned that there were basically two paths to enter the coffee industry: attending training institutions or becoming an apprentice at a coffee shop.

Attending specialized coffee training institutions is the path most easily known to many. Indeed, studying at institutions can quickly provide specialized coffee knowledge, but for A, who hadn't even received his graduation certificate yet, the high tuition fees made him abandon this idea.

That left only the path of becoming an apprentice at a coffee shop, but he didn't choose this route either. He knew that learning coffee as an apprentice is very slow for knowledge growth. One reason was that A, who was practically a blank slate regarding coffee, understood it only as a beverage. There aren't many coffee shops willing to allow beginners like A to learn coffee knowledge, after all, coffee shops need to be profitable, and shops that spend money nurturing beginners are few and far between.

The second reason is that atmosphere is very important. If you stay in an atmosphere that isn't what you want for a long time, you can easily forget your original intentions. A's goal was clear: he truly wanted to understand coffee, to learn everything about it. So, on a friend's recommendation, he bought several books about coffee knowledge and began studying.

After studying through books, A gained some understanding of coffee knowledge and was no longer the "complete novice" he once was. With accumulated theoretical knowledge, Friend A decided to work at a coffee shop to gain practical experience. He was lucky and was quickly hired by an independent coffee shop.

After working at that coffee shop for some time, he discovered that what he had learned before was just scratching the surface, and some knowledge often seemed contradictory. A gradually began to lose confidence and started questioning his choices. So he decided to study at a coffee training institution. After systematically learning at a coffee training institution, he worked at several coffee shops, and recently, he finally opened his own coffee shop.

When recently asked if he had any regrets about his coffee learning journey, he said that although he had taken some detours, he didn't regret the choices he made at each fork in the road, because given the circumstances at the time, he had chosen the optimal solution. Even now, he continues to learn new coffee knowledge every day.

How Can We Get Started with Coffee?

Coffee training institutions are currently the most scientific learning method for beginners. This isn't to say that coffee training institutions are particularly amazing, but rather, we live in an era of paying for knowledge. When you pay money, training institutions must fulfill their responsibilities. Of course, with established coffee knowledge frameworks like SCA, learning becomes more effortless. FrontStreet Coffee is referring to the framework for learning coffee knowledge. As for whether you can become a coffee expert after completing the training, obviously, those who think this way don't understand SCA's mission.

When you complete SCA's credits and receive that final certificate, congratulations, you've finally gotten started with coffee. That's right, completing the entire SCA curriculum only means you have a certain understanding of the basic framework of coffee knowledge.

Of course, many people will ask whether coffee training courses are worth attending. They are definitely worth it, after all, having teachers to resolve your doubts is more efficient than self-reflection, provided you find reliable teachers. As for the considerable tuition fees, that depends on everyone's financial situation and should be approached according to your means. In summary: useful, but not cost-effective.

Self-Learning Path

The second approach is self-learning, which comes in many forms: reading books and practicing with equipment on your own, working at coffee shops, or visiting various coffee shops as an enthusiast to learn from them. Generally speaking, self-learning requires more time, but the expenses aren't necessarily lower, and it heavily depends on individual abilities.

Among these, reading books and practicing with equipment has one weakness: timeliness. For the rapidly changing coffee market, past coffee knowledge may not necessarily apply to today. Today's advanced internet allows people to know everything about the world without leaving home, but online information can be true or false - how many people can distinguish with perfect clarity? Another point is that self-learning can easily lead to detours, and you might go all the way down a wrong path only to discover it's a dead end and have to start over.

Working at coffee shops to gain experience seems very appealing - you can enjoy the coffee atmosphere while learning coffee knowledge. It sounds wonderful. In some coffee shops that focus on quality and operations, you can learn a lot about coffee brewing and shop management, but beyond that, it's difficult to learn other aspects of coffee knowledge. This is under relatively good conditions, while some coffee shops will only teach you perfect etiquette.

Visiting coffee shops to learn from them, FrontStreet Coffee believes that the vast majority of coffee shops are very hospitable and willing to share coffee knowledge. Those with systematic framework knowledge will benefit greatly, but for beginners without a coffee framework, they cannot distinguish between right and wrong and can easily experience knowledge conflicts, leading them into overthinking.

SCA Coffee System Framework Diagram, from SCA official website

Building Your Coffee Knowledge Framework

After discussing so many ways to get started, have you noticed that the goal of getting started with coffee is actually to establish a solid coffee knowledge framework? Only when you build a larger, stronger framework can you accommodate more knowledge that's less likely to collapse. Whether you seek guidance from teachers, study diligently on your own, or accumulate experience through work, you're in the process of building your own coffee cognitive framework. As your understanding grows, you'll simultaneously discover how small you truly are.