Better Coffee For More People

At Building Coffee this week, we’ve spent hours talking about what “specialty” is. It’s something we need to communicate to our customers, but it’s a moving target as far as the industry is concerned. And absent a satisfactory “official” definition, what ends up being used is more colloquial, which is to say regional, cultural and, at times, sub-cultural.

The Specialty Coffee Association has struggled to define “specialty coffee” for the entirety of its existence. It’s always been a moving target defined by trends and tastes.

Also this week my Re:co presentation found its way online via the Coffee Knowledge Hub.

In it, I talk about the way that a so-called producing country became both a consuming powerhouse and a trendsetter in terms of coffee culture.

My basic premise was: specialty has itself become a culture. Some of the trappings of that culture - V60s, craft roasting, nice packaging, wild processing techniques - can be present without virtue of the type of quality that old school “specialty” purveyors would accept.

Technically, specialty coffee is anything that scores above 80 points. But specialty coffee obsessives tend to conflate specialty with their own preferences instead.

And culturally, specialty coffee is about just that: preferences. With a large enough group size, preferences will begin to diverge in every direction, adding to the long list of cliches we associate with specialty coffee cafes.

Let’s not ignore the backlash. A few years ago, McDonald’s had an advertising campaign poking fun at the specialty coffee movement with all its flourishes and pretense, speaking straight to the sensibilities of their vast customer base. Which, by the way, is about 68 million people daily.

So, if specialty is either a trope or a highly rigid set of preferences, what good is a cupping score? Which differentiators matter?

Here’s what I believe and what I practice: it’s about broadening the scope so that “good coffee” is available to more people — maybe not coffee that a specialty coffee connoisseur gets excited about for their own consumption, but rather a general leveling-up of quality for the coffee-drinking population at large.

So, perhaps a fruitful way to come at this line of questioning is to highlight what specialty isn’t:

Specialty Coffee isn’t about roast style or roast level; it’s not about our favorite arabica variety or processing method; it’s not about a specific group of coffee origins; it’s not a particular brewing method. 

Specialty coffee is about provenance and quality of production. 

In this case, meeting the scoring criteria of 80 points or above — meaning, it is free of defects and has discernible flavor attributes. This is great news because more coffee fits under that umbrella. 

Since specialty buyers tend to be narrowly focused, the bulk of a given producer’s coffee won’t be sold at specialty prices even if it qualifies under the cupping score criteria. 

That’s just not fair.

Producing specialty requires more labor and investment, which means a producer’s costs are higher when they choose to aspire to specialty at any scale. Shouldn’t they be able to rely on criteria that doesn’t shift with preferences?

This isn’t a full-blown argument for rigid cupping criteria when labeling “specialty,” but rather throwing my two cents into the debate, realizing it will take an entire industry to define itself, and that means both ends of the commodity chain.

The motivations aren’t necessarily at odds: producers pursue specialty for higher prices and to have pride in their work. Green coffee buyers pursue specialty for various reasons related to novelty and preference (or in some cases, on behalf of a target consuming audience). With greater alignment, these two parties could develop practices that are mutually beneficial, resulting in better coffee for more people.