What determines good coffee from bad? At the end of the day, You Do. And so do we. And so does everyone who tastes your coffee. The question of quality in specialty coffee has for a long time been confused with the idea of sensory or quality assessment. This confusion has in turn been used as a tool for gatekeeping and collecting tolls.

Quality (aka good or bad) is an interpretation that a person makes after processing (aka tasting) some information about a coffee. Of course, quality can be assigned from more than just tasting. In the context of Sensory Analysis, however, tasting is the main mode that we’re going to look at.

Quality assessment on the other hand is what occurs when that person has a stated metric for what constitutes quality and a system for measuring coffees against that metric. While the metric itself is still just what some person or organization thinks is good and bad, there are key differences from the “quality discovery” of tasters who are determining quality at the table. For one, quality assessment means that cuppers are not determining the quality of a coffee or its attributes. Instead, they are measuring the target qualities of a coffee against a stated metric for those qualities. The stated metric is the definition of quality. This definition, as a stated metric, brings us to another key difference which is that in a quality assessment environment the qualities and their values are fixed. Chocolate is always chocolate in an assessment system whereas in undefined systems sometimes chocolate is great and sometimes it’s not.

At Cafe Imports, we have stated and standardized our quality metrics in a cupping tool called the Coffee Rose. We have a team of professionals in our sensory analysis department whose job it is to assess, describe, and assist with the purchasing of every lot of green coffee that passes through our international warehouses and offerings sheets. Our cupping lab evaluates more than 5,000 coffees each year. The professionals in our sensory analysis department are also constantly roasting, sorting, inspecting, and tracking additional data such as moisture content, coffee bean color, shape, and size, and water activity.

While all of this is true, it doesn’t mean that you have to agree with what we think is good. Because the Coffee Rose is freely available for anyone to use, our preferences are on full display. There’s nothing hidden there, and we don’t mistake our preferences for yours or law. If you love the herbal or nutty or low acid coffees that we don’t score as highly, we’d much rather know and use that information to help you find the coffees that you love than worry for even a second about whether one coffee is somehow cooler than another. We don’t use our sensory team and coffee ratings to try and make you like what we like. Cupping and the Coffee Rose are tools that we use to gather the best coffee information that we can, with the specific goal of better helping you find your coffees. We are not coffee critics at Cafe Imports. We are coffee somms. We have access to and experience with a massive range of coffees and can help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Check the drop downs below for even more in-depth information about how we conduct sensory analysis here, what our cupping scores and notes mean, and how you can get involved and use the Coffee Rose in your own roasteries and shops.