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

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style).

For more specialty coffee beans, please add the private WeChat of FrontStreet Coffee, WeChat ID: qjcoffeex

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 demanding to add 'sweetness' to the SCA Cupping Form as one of the coffee sensory evaluation items (scoring items). We also 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 successfully concluded.

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 from the perspective of food science. Earlier this year, Mario discussed the idea of redefining and evaluating coffee attributes at the Re:co conference (this conference brings together industry professionals who have in-depth research and influence in the specialty coffee field for in-depth discussions and innovation-driven industry development).

The Three Questions of Sensory Evaluation

When using sensory judgment to determine whether a cup of coffee is good or not, 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, it is actually highly discouraged to mix three different types of sensory evaluations together, because when people make judgments, it is difficult to fairly make all three types of sensory evaluations simultaneously. However, the existing SCA Cupping Form contains situations where three different types of sensory evaluation items are placed together.

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 create a separation between descriptive and affective judgment evaluations. To address this, 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 judging flavor performance in coffee), affective judgment (for judging personal impression of coffee quality), external attributes, and value discovery.

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

Coffee Flavor Wheel Updates

Regarding the Coffee Flavor Wheel, Mario mentioned that many flavor references in the current wheel come from the North American region, which cannot allow people from all regions to use the descriptions as references.

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

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

Expanding the Score Gap Between Specialty and Commercial Coffee

In addition to 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 allow specialty coffee to receive higher scores, while poor-quality coffee will receive lower scores. For example, coffee that currently scores 80 points might only score 75 points or even lower in the future. Mario stated that this situation does not represent a decline in coffee quality, but rather a change in judgment standards and concepts, which is why the scores will be lower.

Image source: Internet

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473