SCA Specialty Coffee Association Announces New Reforms for Coffee Flavor Wheel and Cupping Form!

The Need for SCA Cupping Form Updates

"The SCA Cupping Form, as a standard widely used by the global coffee industry to measure coffee value, has not been updated for a long time. In the twenty years since this form was invented, the coffee industry has undergone tremendous changes, and sensory science has continued to develop and advance.

Nowadays, more and more people are calling for 'sweetness' to be added to the SCA Cupping Form as one of the coffee sensory evaluation scoring items. We too realize that the sensory evaluation items in the form need to change."

This is information shared by SCA's Technical Officer Mario Fernandez, hereinafter referred to as Mario, at a farm reception after this year's BOP (Best of Panama) competition concluded successfully.

Mario's Background and Expertise

Mario comes from a Mexican family that grows coffee. Before taking on the role of SCA Technical Officer in 2020, he had been researching how to understand coffee through the lens of food science. Earlier this year, Mario discussed the idea of redefining and evaluating coffee attributes at the Re:co conference, an event that brings together industry professionals with deep research and influence in the specialty coffee field for in-depth discussion and innovation-driven industry development.

The Three Questions of Sensory Evaluation

When using sensory judgment to decide whether a cup of coffee is good, three questions are indispensable: Can you taste the difference? What flavors can you taste? Do you personally like it? These three questions involve discriminative judgment, descriptive judgment, and affective judgment.

In sensory science, mixing three different types of sensory evaluation together is actually strongly discouraged, because when people make judgments it is difficult to carry out all three fairly and simultaneously. The existing SCA Cupping Form, however, places three different types of sensory evaluation items side by side.

Among them, 'Body' and 'Balance' use affective judgment, 'Uniformity' uses discriminative judgment, and 'Intensity' uses descriptive judgment.

The Solution: A New Cupping Form

Mario stated that to solve this problem, it is necessary to separate descriptive judgment from affective judgment. To that end, SCA has collaborated with the World Sensory Institute to develop a new cupping form.

The new form adds descriptive vocabulary and some additional key questions to the original cupping form, creating a new coffee value evaluation system through five comprehensive perspectives: green bean grade, descriptive judgment for assessing flavor performance in coffee, affective judgment for assessing personal impression of quality, external attributes, and value discovery.

With these items separated, the bias caused by mixing the three types of evaluation can be greatly reduced, and people can more clearly understand the judgments they make for each type of sensory evaluation and give fairer scores. The SCA Cupping Form reform plan is still under discussion and improvement and has not yet been used externally.

Coffee Flavor Wheel Updates

On the Coffee Flavor Wheel, Mario mentioned that many flavor references in the current wheel come from the North American region, which means people in other regions cannot use the descriptions as reliable references.

Some of the vocabulary cannot be translated into other languages, leading to significant differences in descriptive judgment among people from different regions when scoring the same coffee.

SCA, the World Sensory Institute, and the Coffee Science Foundation are therefore compiling globally applicable flavor references and creating translations that can be integrated into different regional cultures.

Expanding the Score Gap Between Specialty and Commercial Coffee

In addition to the reforms to the SCA Cupping Form and Coffee Flavor Wheel, Mario also stated at the farm reception that SCA intends to widen the score difference between specialty coffee and commercial coffee.

The purpose is to let specialty coffee receive higher scores while poor-quality coffee receives lower ones. For example, a coffee that scores 80 points today might score only 75 points or even lower in the future. Mario stated that this does not represent a decline in coffee quality, but rather a change in judgment standards and concepts, which is why the scores will come out lower.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Standards and scoring keep evolving, but the best way to understand what those scores mean is to taste the coffees they are meant to describe. Panama is an excellent place to start, since its terroir has set the benchmark for so much of the specialty world. FrontStreet's Boquete washed Geisha is the accessible introduction, grown at 1600 meters on the fertile volcanic ash soil of the Boquete region, where cloud cover keeps days humid and nights cool, producing a delicate cup of jasmine, green tea, honey, citrus, and orange.

If you want a taste of the Geisha family in a more affordable form, FrontStreet's Panama washed Butterfly carries half Geisha blood, blended with Caturra and Catuai and grown in the Baru volcano area of Boquete. The region's abundant rainfall, large day-night temperature swings, and distinctive volcanic soil give it impressive body, bright citrus acidity, and clear Geisha jasmine aroma, and it works well both as pour-over and cold brew.

For the highest expression, FrontStreet's Esmeralda Red Label Geisha is harvested from a single plot above 1700 meters, with each lot cupped above 91 points, delivering the refined orange-blossom honey character that the estate is known for.