WHAT MAKES A COFFEE ‘SPECIALTY’?

Coffee is a complex thing. It has over one thousand constituents in its chemical
makeup, forty or so of which are in the threshold for our detection, which is why it can
be challenging to articulate our sensory experience of it, let alone universally define its
quality. With any quality-driven product, there must be care and value all along the
chain of production to the consumer. With coffee, defining specialty is by no means less
complex than its chemistry. To shed light on each of these steps, and to attempt to
define specialty for coffee, we held a discussion with a panel of industry leaders who
specialise in different aspects of the coffee industry. Let’s frame and talk to the key
topics from the discussion.

HOW BELIEFS ABOUT COFFEE ARE CREATED

All problems in the world, it seems, are induced by human beliefs. This poses a
challenge when trying to agree on quality of flavour. Quality is not a hardwired or fixed
thing that comes inherent in each of us. It is emotionally contextual, which means that
your beliefs around it strengthen with repeated experience in a certain emotional
context. For example, I have a friend who started drinking filter coffee when he came to
visit. He was only in Sydney for three months, and the filter coffee here was vastly
different from where he grew up. He associated it with something cheap that you
brewed at home, from beans you purchased from the supermarket, that were already
pre-ground for your convenience. In Sydney, a specialty-grade filter coffee can taste of
anything from citrus fruits to cocoa, from cherries to chocolate. At first he couldn’t
understand why we would drink such swill. My friends and I included him in our weekly
brunch club where he joined us in drinking filter coffee from various countries of origin,
and from many different coffee roasting companies. Along with this, he made strong
connections, true friends and happy memories during his stay. This created direct
associations to the flavours of specialty-grade filter coffee. This is now his reference for
quality.

With the flavour and quality of coffee around the world being so varied, a lot of the time
when you go travelling you may simply find no enjoyment in the provincial preparation of
the beverage. It’s just poles apart from your expectations of the product you’ve
experienced and named ‘coffee’. What I mean is, if you’re used to drinking a bucket of
filter coffee that has been sitting on the hot plate of a brewer for 6 hours, that has been
roasted to ensure a lower acidity and enhanced bitterness and body, and you come to
Sydney or Melbourne and are presented this cup of single origin, naturally processed
coffee that tastes like cherries and chocolate, this can challenge you to comprehend this
beverage as coffee. Without the happy, repeated context that my friend had, home you
would go to announce that you just couldn’t get a good cup of coffee in Australia.
Without a broad range of experience from coffee all around the world, your beliefs of
quality are provincial – learned from your immediate environment. This cultural disparity
of flavour is the first thing to attempt to disseminate when measuring quality.

MEASURING QUALITY
Leading up to our public discussion, we interviewed people in the greater coffee
community to see what specialty coffee is for them. When asked how to measure
specialty, there was talk of attributing a number to the quality of a coffee.

There are two main systems for this out there in coffee world – the COE (Cup of
Excellence) and the CQI’s (Coffee Quality Institute) Q Grade. In essence, you take
certain aspects of flavour and attribute them a score – acidity, body, balance, etc. Your
calibration points are reference samples around taste and smell, along with the person
teaching you. When you compare scores with your teacher after tasting a coffee, you
can adjust accordingly. Taste another coffee and repeat until there is a similarity in your
scores. For this to work, your scoring must be kept private until the tasting is complete.

The teachers have to be calibrated, and there must be standards in place for each step
of the coffee’s preparation. The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) has
these standards for green coffee, cupping, water quality and brewing, with roasting still
to come.

To start off our discussion with the panel of coffee professionals, we asked of this
process. What are these numbers for? How important is it to be able to measure quality
objectively?

Emily Oak of Sensory Lab spoke to the Q grade system, noting that it’s a two-tiered
thing. It’s a quality stamp based on a numerical assessment of coffee, and it was
originally devised to create a language between producers and buyers, so that people
could rate coffee in different places and theoretically have a more objective
understanding of what quality is, and the value attributed to that coffee.

Tuli Keidar, general manager of Mecca coffee, mentioned that he has seen the Q
grading system work best at the green coffee exporter level. If an exporter or roaster
wants to work with a farm, they need to give them some level of objective feedback,
which aligns with a certain price point. What a farmer wants, if they are quality-
orientated and aligned with a specialty market, is to get better prices for their coffee. If
you cup a coffee and it’s come out as an 83, then you communicate to the farmer that if
they did x, y, z in their processing, this would lead to an 85. Hopefully they will invest in
their production and that would achieve a higher price for their coffee.
What you can find, however, at a specialty coffee auction, is that if a coffee has ranked
well objectively, it may not fetch a higher price than a coffee that has scored a little
lower. This, as mentioned earlier, is probably due to cultural ideas around a quality of
flavour.

Recently, there has been a landmark tool created to assist with this, and other fields of
research within the coffee industry. The SCAA flavour wheel, with the WCR (World
Coffee Research) sensory lexicon, gives us a language to be able to articulate what we
do or don’t like about a coffee. The lexicon has 110 attributes to articulate a coffee’s
flavour, each with a description, matched to a reference sample, with a 15-point
intensity marker in order to score that attribute. Studies can now be conducted into
cultural ideas around quality, where people can define what flavours seem to be a
preference based on the lexicon. Maybe soon, as Tuli mentioned, better objective
communication can go back to the producer with specific flavour requirements around
quality, with the hope of helping them fetch a higher price.

INDUSTRY EVOLUTION OF SPECIALTY COFFEE

Are we closer to our definition of specialty in coffee? To recap; we prepare a coffee in a
certain way and it scores 80 and + based on the SCAA standards. We articulate cultural
flavour preferences and intensities based on the lexicon, and that’s pretty much it, right?
Sean McManus, owner of Neighbourhood, an espresso bar in Surry Hills, says that
specialty is just a word. That as soon as everyone starts to do specialty, then it is no
longer special. The point of specialty is to be constantly striving for a higher level.
Specialty dies the second you wipe your hands of it and think it’s done.

One of the platforms that has aided in the evolution of the specialty coffee industry is
the WBC (World Barista Championship). This stage has set many trends and has
provided the opportunity for baristas to tell the story of their passions – from the farmer,
to new technologies and research that have bettered the quality of flavour of coffee.
Sasa Sestic, owner of Ona Coffee, and the 2015 World Barista Campion, says you can
see the fruits of this: every time you walk into a specialty coffee shop, you see an EK43
grinder on every bench, and that was a result of Matt Perger’s competition. Maxwell
Colonna-Dashwood’s presentation on water for coffee got Sasa obsessed with water,
as it has for many.

A note on evolution in general, is that its speed and form are shaped by the
environment and competition. When we interviewed Sharon Jan, the green coffee buyer
for Seven Miles Coffee Roasters, she mentioned that yes, it seems that specialty coffee
is measured as 80 and + coffee, but a lot of the time when creating products for
Australian specialty markets it will demand a higher level of specialty – coffees that
score 85 and +. Has the expectation of specialty coffee in Australia already shifted? Has
the competition and amount of cafes, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, shaped this
higher level of expectation from a specialty coffee consumer? For our definition, it
seems that we somehow need to take this into account – specialty will evolve at
different rates in different places around the world. This axiom of periodic review due to
evolution needs to exist in order for specialty to change and still be measured.

It’s important to state that what we have been talking about here, this objective scoring,
is the quality measurement of a coffee on a cupping table. The point where a coffee is
selected by the roaster, or the assessor. The question from here is, does a specialty
coffee have to be roasted a certain way for it to remain special, or should there be set
brewing parameters for a barista to follow?

This topic wasn’t explored in too much detail by our panel, and I think this will inevitably
be a discussion on its own.

FLAVOUR: MORE THAN NUMBERS

What Sean and Emily did highlight is that when a barista is measuring a coffee, you are
not chasing a number. The number or measurement of a refractometer, or a timer, or a
set of scales, or a thermometer – is just that: numbers to show you where you are. They
give you repeatability and a reference point. Flavour, however, is king.

In our interviews, it seems specialty coffee wasn’t just about scoring, measuring and
assessing quality. It has a sense of responsibility, a story of transparency, traceability
and sustainability. We asked the panel their views to see if this was true.

On the importance of traceability, John Russell Storey, marketing manager of Cofi-Com,

one of Australia’s largest green coffee importers, says that traceability is just part of
their business. They have to know where the coffee comes from, to visit origin to ensure
that the next crop is going to be available, that the farmer hasn’t ripped up the trees to
plant a crop that will be more valuable. You have to make sure that the relationship with
the farmer is going to be long-term. In order for a farmer to produce a specialty coffee,
you have to convince them that the bucket of cherries they pick off the tree, which has
to be sorted rigorously to remove the defects in order to meet that quality score, will in
fact fetch an appropriate price despite the lower yield. At the end of the day, they need
to feed their families and send their children to school.

Traceability is important in a specialty market also for identifying things that have gone
wrong. In some countries, you can trace coffee back to the individual trees they came
from. If you taste an exceptional coffee, it’s important to be able to identify which trees it
is from so we can cultivate off that.

Sasa says that traceability is very important to specialty coffee. It gives direct feedback
from consumer, to roaster, to producer. If you have that traceability, you can help invest
and work on different techniques in order to raise the quality of the coffee. This, for him,
develops long and strong personal relationships with the farmers.

Tuli had a different take on the importance of traceability, especially in the context of
direct trade relationships. What these relationships do is ensure transparency all along
the chain from farmer to the consumer. Just because a consumer is paying a premium
price and it is being sold as a specialty product, doesn’t mean the money is being fairly
distributed along this chain. If you are marketing your product as traceable, if you’re
putting the name of the farm on a coffee to help achieve a premium price, but you don’t
know if they were being fairly paid, then that is unethical. So it seems traceability should
also provide accountability.

John, agreeing with this, added the point that people who are going in to origin and
buying direct need to know who they are cutting out, and what income they are relying
on. You have to take advice from the people on the ground locally, that aren’t transient,
as to where the money is best invested. A lot of the time, just giving the farmer more
money isn’t the solution. What they find is that building a school or providing medical
supplies is far more beneficial.

For Sean, from a retail perspective, the more you can know about a product the better.
With coffee, for him, it shouldn’t be that hard. You are only dealing with four to six
products per month. If you can’t inform or sell it to a consumer as well as a TV
salesman can sell you a plasma TV, then you’re pretty lazy.

To talk to the feeling you get in the industry, that specialty coffee is sustainable, Sasa
pointed out that with the farms he deals with, approximately 6–10% of their crop is of
specialty grade. For a farm to survive on specialty alone, he feels that it depends a lot
on the cost of production. In some countries, the yield is significantly lower, and
therefore impossible. Another point from Tuli and Emily is that climate change will
influence yield and the cost of production significantly. Crops are moving up the hills to
cooler climates, and the raised cost of production will require everyone to pay more for
specialty coffees.

SELLING SPECIALTY COFFEE

It seems that the motivation to sell specialty coffee is to ensure that we have an impact
all the way down the supply chain. That everyone is being paid fairly. If people are
willing to pay a little more and understand the value of that product, then we should
make it approachable for them. Select certain coffees, roast it a certain way, so long as
we can have that impact.
On this question of selling specialty coffee, there seemed to be a general feeling of
elitism that comes from the baristas in specialty coffee. Our professionals all agreed that
there is no need for this arrogance. It offers no assistance to promote the value of
specialty coffee.

Sean feels it’s important to gauge your customer and not impose your beliefs upon
them. If they enjoy a large cappuccino with two sugars, then respect that and make sure
they are comfortable in their decision. If you have a customer that wants to geek out,
then bring them behind the bar and share an experience with them – taste a coffee
together and take them on that ride.

Emily says that people don’t want to be forced to do things in a particular way, to be told
what to do when they walk into a café. There’s no point in having the best coffee and
the most beautiful espresso bar if you’re going to tell them to drink from this and stand
over there.

Tuli shared his most memorable coffee experience with us, saying that the coffee he
had at Campos some 8 years ago, which was combined with great service, the
showmanship of the baristas, the music, the whole sensory experience around it was
what made it really special. It can be easy for a barista to get lost in the fascinating
details of coffee and forget that a coffee house is not a place to deconstruct flavours. It’s
a place to feel good, to have human experience and to be pampered by charming
people.

We need to think about what makes coffee valuable, why it is we drink it, and why it is
we have been drinking it for hundreds of years.

A FINAL DEFINITION?
Defining specialty coffee isn’t hard, but humans agreeing on that definition certainly is,
and herein lies the complexity. An average consumer isn’t going to go down the rabbit
hole to understand this, or calibrate their senses just to enjoy a product. They just want
something that tastes good to them and makes them feel good while they’re drinking it.
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