Coffee Quality, Pt 1 — The birth of specialty coffee flavours

James Harper:

April 2025. Everybody in the North American specialty coffee community has flown in to Houston. This is the Specialty Coffee Association's annual expo, and we're all there milling around in the trade show, bright lights, loud noises, enjoying specialty coffee, celebrating it as a community.

But then, on the second day, everyone's phones blow up with a shock announcement. A decision that came completely out of left field. The SCA, the Specialty Coffee Association, announced that the Q, the Quality Grading System, this flavor assessment tool that's been the bedrock of the specialty coffee industry for 20 years, is going to change in major fundamental ways in a matter of months.

It is really hard to overstate how important the Q is to specialty coffee. The Q helped us define what specialty coffee even is. A tool that would massively influence how much a farmer gets paid for their coffee.

A tool where thousands upon thousands upon thousands of coffee professionals have given up weeks of their life and thousands of years to learn how to use. But the SCA said that in a matter of months, that entire system is changing. It was really quite extraordinary walking around because everybody was like shell-shocked.

I heard anger, frustration, disappointment. And the SCA's replacement for the Q, the CVA, Coffee Value Assessment, which will confusingly also be called the Q going forward, there were so many people who were mistrustful. Very unenthusiastic, to put it mildly.

And look, a lot of those feelings are because of the politics behind this shift. But I don't want to get bogged down into that. That's not what this episode is about.

If you do want to get into the inter-organizational politics of the whole thing, Lisa Farr of the Map It Forward podcast interviewed the head of CQI, the organization that was giving the Q over to the SCA. And Michael Sheridan, the head of CQI, he lays out the context very clearly. Link in the show notes.

And to be super clear, what you're going to hear in these episodes are my own personal observations. I'm not affiliated with the SCA or any of the organizations mentioned. And this episode doesn't have a sponsor either.

For me, that announcement in Houston marks the dividing line between two different eras. We have what is now the old era, where the 2004 form from the SCAA, from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, defined what coffee quality is with a form that produced a number out of 100. It created this world where quality and how we talk about quality was incredibly aligned.

Not always, not perfectly, but surprisingly so. But this new era we're moving into, one based around the coffee value assessment, this new system the SCA has been prototyping, shies away from defining what quality coffee is in this kind of universal way that the old form used to. And as the dust settled after Houston, I found myself chewing again on a question that I'd been thinking about for years already.

How did we in specialty coffee end up with such a definitive idea of what a quality coffee tastes like? How is it that across continents and different cultures, you get two specialty coffee professionals together in the same room and ask them to describe what makes for high quality coffee and they will both probably say clean, sweet, juicy, bright. Where did that definition come from?

Why those attributes? And is this a good or a bad thing for coffee farmers? In this three-part miniseries, I'm exploring the question, who got to decide what good coffee is?

What happens when that decision is frozen into a cupping form and how does that impact coffee farmers? In part one, this episode, I show you how distinctive flavors became the foundation for a conception of quality and then how it became universal. And then in part two, I'm going to show you why quality actually just reflects one particular set of preferences and is very much not universal.

And then in part three, I ask what does this illusion of universal coffee quality do to the people growing coffee? And what might a better system look like? I'm James Halper and this is Filter Stories, the untold stories hidden in a cup of coffee.

And in this episode, we trace the origin story of the Q and how we settled on the specific flavors that define specialty coffee. So the 2004 cupping form from the Specialty Coffee Association of America defined the quote unquote old era of coffee quality. This form gave us the tools for defining sensorially what coffee quality is.

This is a form that splits the sensory coffee experience into lots of different categories, sweetness, flavor, body, aftertaste, clean cup. But I was curious to know why those attributes? Why not other attributes?

Where did they come from? Well, to get an answer, we have to go right back to the beginnings of the specialty coffee movement itself.

Dramatized voice:

I'm serious, honey, your coffee is undrinkable.

Dramatized voice:

It's pretty harsh.

Dramatized voice:

Well, so is your coffee.

James Harper:

Back in time to the 1960s in America, the dark days before there even was specialty, before it even had its name.

Dramatized voice:

Why don't you try Instant Folgers? Tastes good as perked.

James Harper:

And then a small movement develops what we would today call the specialty coffee movement. And there were many people in it all pursuing similar aims. There are dozens of people I could have chosen to focus this story on, but I want to focus it on my personal favorite story, a legend, the founder of Knudsen Coffees.

Erna Knutsen:

My name is Erna Knudsen, E-R-N-A-K-N-U-T-S-E-N.

James Harper:

I want to focus on Erna's story just because I love it so much. She christened our industry with its name.

Erna Knutsen:

I don't know, it sounded good, specialty coffee. And people looked at me and said, specialty coffee? What the hell is that?

Well, what could you say? Fancy, extra fancy, fabulous.

Dramatized voice:

You know, the girls down at the office make better coffee on their hot plates.

James Harper:

And what I also love about it is the fact that, you know, she was a woman in the 60s and 70s who was stuck under a glass ceiling in a man's world. She wasn't even allowed to taste coffee in the same room as men.

Erna Knutsen:

I was kept out of the coffee room because I was a woman, but there were all men and they decided that women didn't deserve the break.

James Harper:

But she would eventually smash through that glass ceiling by, in her words.

Erna Knutsen:

I bought the company and fired them all.

James Harper:

Now, Erna passed in 2018, and I'm really grateful to Bjorg Budend, Kevin Sinnott, and the SCA for preserving these rare interviews. But now let's rewind the story back to the dark days before there was specialty, when Erna was still under that glass ceiling. Erna's personal discovery of what would become known as specialty coffee began for her in her late 40s.

Living in San Francisco, she had taken a job with the coffee importer BC Ireland. And BC Ireland was importing commodity coffee. They were what I call commercial.

Generic beans that were sold by the container load to very large American roasting brands like Folgers, Maxwell House. They would blend it in this big can. They'd be blended, ground up, and then sold in tins on supermarket shelves, bought by American housewives who'd scoop the grounds into a percolator, and then brew up a weak, watery batch of coffee served with creamer and sugar.

This is the world of mainstream commodity coffee. Few consumers had any idea that coffees could taste dramatically different. At this coffee importer, Erna's work was mostly just secretarial, you know, keeping track of the green coffee that the company was buying and selling.

But her role also included handling the inbound queries from tiny little roasters on the West Coast who were looking for very, very small lots of somewhat more interesting coffees. So, day in, day out, Erna is tasting generic commodity coffees on her desk because she's not allowed in the cupping room. And none of these coffees are terribly exciting or interesting until one day, something shakes Erna's world.

A car pulls up outside the offices.

Erna Knutsen:

One day, a young Indonesian came in. He was a student at Stanford. The son of Pawani, the great big firm that sells the finest Sumatra there is in the world.

James Harper:

And the son of this large Indonesian coffee producer says, I've got a very rare Indonesian coffee.

Erna Knutsen:

Mandailing Sumatra.

James Harper:

And a replica coffee from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Mandailing Sumatra is named after the people who live there, and it's known for its wet-howled process that gives it a very heavy body, low acidity, and deep, earthy spice flavors.

Erna Knutsen:

Well, my heart stopped because I'd heard of that. And my best customer, Erna, if you ever get anything like Mandailing Sumatra, please let me know.

James Harper:

Erna brings the green beans upstairs to get roasted.

Erna Knutsen:

There were four men, and I was sitting in the back because I was female, and they roasted it, made the coffee, and the guy roasted said, Erna, stay in your cubicle, we'll bring you a cup.

James Harper:

And eventually, a cup is brought to Erna's cubicle.

Erna Knutsen:

Oh my god, it's creamy. Oh!

James Harper:

Erna tastes something distinct. This luscious creaminess.

Erna Knutsen:

And my god, it really was the finest coffee I'd ever had in my life.

James Harper:

Does this sound familiar? This is the ah-ha moment. The same ah-ha moment that everybody who loves specialty coffee also experiences at one point for the first time.

I experienced it myself under the train arches of central London, drinking my first specialty coffee from Monmouth. You had your own experience, and that's why, ultimately, you're listening to this podcast. And this ah-ha moment, it's all about flavor.

This is the first value that continues to define specialty coffee today, the foundational value. Specialty coffee is all about distinctive flavors. And in these archival interviews of Erna, you know, she's in her 90s, but you can still hear how much passion she has for these distinctive flavors.

Erna Knutsen:

I love every coffee we sell, you know, it's just so, it's like a love affair. We buy the best.

Erna Knutsen:

I love Brazil's, I love Kenya's, oh my god, they're wonderful. It's the royal coffee. I love Yogachef, Harar, oh god, wonderful.

It's such a fun thing because you have the best of a product.

James Harper:

So in the 60s and the 70s, we have this movement called specialty coffee, and it prizes flavors that are distinct. And it does this because it is a reaction to the prevailing commodity world. It's a world where coffee is found in cans, pre-ground, on a supermarket shelf, made from cheap Brazilian arabicas, mixed with robustas, dark roasted.

It'll taste stale and bitter, flat, lifeless. Specialty coffees are the opposite of that. This is literally what Erna says.

She defines herself as, I am the opposite of canned commodity coffee.

Erna Knutsen:

I sell really beautifully selected specialty coffee. That means it's never found in a can. That's my only explanation.

James Harper:

And I want to point out something here that's really fundamental. Specialty coffee defines itself always in opposition to the commodity world. We cannot exist without commodity coffee.

In the field of social psychology, this is known as social identity theory. Groups define themselves by what they're not. Vegans, people who don't eat products from animals.

Nonsmokers are those that do not smoke. Atheists don't believe in God. And so the roots of the flavors that would form the basis of the Q form are found right here.

The flavors prized by the Q are the opposite of those found in the commodity world. And coming up next, we dive deeper into what exactly those flavors are. So if the specialty coffee movement defines itself as the opposite of commodity, then the flavors of specialty coffee will be the opposite of commodity coffee.

But what exactly are those flavors?

George Howell:

All right, we are recording right now.

James Harper:

Well, to get an insight into how these developed and eventually would form the basis of the Q, I had a fantastic conversation with the American specialty roaster George Howe, one of the pioneers of the specialty coffee movement.

George Howell:

Well, as of next year, I'll be in specialty coffee for 50 years.

James Harper:

So George tells me that when he started his roastery in Boston back in the 70s, he definitely was not a coffee expert. He was just learning as he went.

George Howell:

You know, we were kids in a sandbox at that time, right? Just learning. We didn't know how to cup.

I wouldn't really start cupping for another 13 years.

James Harper:

And as he is tasting, just exploring what the coffee world has to offer, he begins to zero in on sweetness. And what do you mean by quality back then, if you were to distill it?

George Howell:

That sweet flavor, right? So that's all I knew. I'm sure I had other descriptors, but that's the main drive.

And it always has been. To this day, sweetness is number one, right? Number one.

A lot of coffees don't taste sweet and they don't have that.

James Harper:

And so sweetness becomes an attribute that distinguishes a specialty coffee from a commodity coffee. But it doesn't stop there. Another distinguishing flavor attribute that George zeroed in on back in the 70s was acidity.

George Howell:

So, and without that acidity, everything becomes flat.

James Harper:

As a roaster, George focused on roasting coffees lighter, so he could bring out that vibrancy. Again, in contrast to the flat dullness of a dark roasted commodity coffee. And over time, George and other specialty coffee professionals zero in on yet more attributes.

For example, clean cup.

George Howell:

I make the comparison to a window pane. You want the clearest window pane possible to enjoy the landscape that's in front of you. That's what clean cup is.

James Harper:

And you can go through every part of the Q form and every component of that form, aroma, acidity, flavor, body, aftertaste, balance, clean cup. They all reflect attributes you rarely find altogether in commodity coffee. These are the things that make a coffee so distinct, so special.

Okay. So now let's turn to the form itself. Why did America's specialty coffee professionals in the 90s decide to create a cupping form for specialty coffee?

What were they trying to achieve? What problems were they trying to solve? And so to get a view into the creation of this seminal cupping form, I spoke to one of the big figures of the movement at the time.

Rick Reinhart:

My name is Rick Reinhardt and I spent 35 years in coffee, about 20 of that as a coffee buyer and roaster. I did 12 years as the executive director and CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and later the Specialty Coffee Association.

James Harper:

And just for context, the Specialty Coffee Association of America merged with the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe about 10 years ago to create what is today the SCA. As Rick explained to me, one of the big problems that the form set out to solve was a communication problem.

Rick Reinhart:

They were born of a desire to create a common language between buyer and seller.

James Harper:

By the 90s, we have all these American coffee professionals identifying all these flavors that make coffees unique, but they're struggling to communicate it with one another. When an importer picks up the phone to one of their roaster customers and says, hey, I've got this really, really fine Guatemalan. The roaster's like, uh, fine how?

Is it floral? Citric? Do you mean it's just really, really good?

Going back and forth like this creates so many inefficiencies. It slows down the trade, wastes people's time. The Specialty Coffee Association of America wanted a system to quantify flavors so specialty coffee professionals could talk to one another much more efficiently.

And so a movement begins to harmonize everything into one system. This process that began in the 90s would eventually result in the 2004 cupping form. But what's really interesting is that Ted Lingle, the man who led the initiative within the SCAA to create the cupping form, he and many others wanted a form that did more than just communicate what a coffee tastes like.

They wanted a form that would help highlight and reward distinctive pleasurable attributes in a coffee. As Rick explained to me, there was actually already by the 90s, a grading system for commodity coffees, but specialty was looking for something completely different from the world. The commodity world was focused, obsessed about defects.

In the specialty world, roasters wanted flavors that made coffees distinct. Things like sweetness, acidity, clean cup.

Rick Reinhart:

The specialty buyer tended to have the mirror image perspective of the commercial buyer. So the commercial buyer is looking for coffee that is free of defects. And the specialty buyer was looking for coffee that had the presence of positive nuances.

In particular, I think at that time we were very much interested in a taste of place. Does this coffee taste like it's from Guatemala? Does this coffee taste like it's from Columbia?

And further, does this coffee taste like it's from Willa? Does this coffee taste like it's from Norino, et cetera? So that change from absence of defect to the presence of identifiable nuance is where things really fundamentally changed.

And so all the efforts of the SCAA to put together a cupping form and a process ultimately supported this search for positive nuance and de-emphasized the pass-fail screening for defect.

James Harper:

I want to really emphasize something that Rick just mentioned here. Although the problem the form set out to solve was this issue of communication between specialty coffee professionals, the form was trying to do more than just communicate flavor. They wanted a tool that would also support a search for positive nuance, as in they wanted a tool to help them discover quality coffees.

This is the coffee community at the time saying what we want here is a tool that's not just us speaking a similar language. What we also want is a tool that can help us figure out what is great coffee. This is the difference between saying, you know, what's something objectively tastes like, as in these are the flavors in the cup and they are what they are, and then going that extra step and saying, and by the way, this is what a high quality coffee looks like.

Not just what it tastes like, but ranking it on its quality. What would eventually be created, the 2004 cupping form, it tries to achieve both these things. And the way it rewards distinctive pleasurable attributes is to give an overall quality score out of a hundred.

And it is this scoring system, this definition of quality that goes stratospheric. When it was released, the SCAA cupping form went on to become wildly successful. After the form was released, the Specialty Coffee Association of America tasked this other organization, the Coffee Quality Institute, CQI, to create a system to grade quality that you could teach across borders and scale up across thousands of coffee professionals.

This became known as the Q, as in the letter Q for quality. And at the heart of its assessment is this 2004 cupping form. Thousands and thousands of cuppers, coffee buyers and roasters around the world have been trained through this system, learning to describe quality in exactly the same way.

What began as an American grading tool is now embedded in billions of euros worth of coffee contracts globally. Japanese importers, Korean traders, roasters across five continents. And this is one of the major reasons this definition of quality appears universal.

If you are a coffee farmer and you speak to any coffee professional, they will probably define quality in similar terms. It seems to be their standard. This numbering system floats above every coffee we drink.

It feels bigger than all of us. How could I, anybody, by themselves argue against a system so deeply entrenched? A definition of quality set in stone like this.

But what often gets forgotten, the definition of quality produced by this form, it's not universal. It's just someone's preference. But whose preference exactly?

That's what we explore in part two.