Making Sense of Cupping Scores

You've spotted the numbers on our coffee pages. An 87 here, an 89 there. But what do they actually mean? And why should you care?

Here's the thing: cupping scores are the coffee industry's attempt to put flavour into numbers. It's a bit like rating a sunset out of 100 – slightly absurd, but surprisingly useful when you're trying to communicate quality across continents and languages.

We use Cup of Excellence (CoE) scores rather than the more common SCA system. Why? Partly because CoE represents the most rigorous evaluation process in speciality coffee – these aren't casual assessments, they're the result of six separate rounds of blind cupping by both national and international expert judges. A coffee doesn't just score well; it survives an Olympic-level gauntlet to earn its number.

But there's a more personal reason too. Hasbean founder Steve Leighton spent years serving on CoE international juries around the world – his first origin trip, back in 2004, was to judge Cup of Excellence in Nicaragua. That experience shaped how we think about quality. Our current Green Buyer, Roland Glew, has also served on international CoE juries. When you've spent days calibrating your palate alongside the best cuppers in the world, the system becomes second nature. It stuck.

What we're actually measuring

The CoE protocol evaluates eight attributes, each scored on a scale of 0 to 8:

Clean Cup – The foundation of everything else. This goes beyond simply being free of defects – it's about clarity. Can you distinguish the different flavours? Are the acidity, sweetness, and mouthfeel each apparent and separate, or does everything blur into disorder? A clean cup has no off-tastes, no dirty notes, no harshness or astringency muddying the picture. It's the transparency that lets everything else come through clearly.

Sweetness – This correlates directly with how uniformly ripe the coffee was when harvested. Not just ripe cherries, but consistently ripe cherries across the entire pick. Sweetness isn't only about sugar content – it's the combined impression created by multiple components working together. The natural reward for patience and precision at harvest.

Acidity – This is what brightens a coffee. It gives life. In wine terms, you'd call it nerve or backbone. Here's the crucial bit: judges score the quality of the acidity, not the quantity. A coffee doesn't need to be highly acidic to score well – what matters is whether that acidity is refined and pleasant or harsh and biting. Is there a crisp snap, or does it fall flat?

Mouthfeel – The tactile sensation: viscosity, density, weight, texture, astringency. How does the coffee physically feel? Buttery? Creamy? Round and smooth? As with acidity, it's quality over quantity – a light-bodied coffee can score just as well as a heavy one if the mouthfeel is well-executed.

Flavour – A combination of taste and aroma, and where a fine coffee can truly stand out. The question judges ask: is this a genuine expression of terroir – of place, of care, of craft – or is it merely generic? Some flavours, while pleasant, are reproducible anywhere. The best coffees offer something that couldn't come from anywhere else.

Aftertaste – What happens after you swallow can either reinforce the pleasure of everything that came before, or sabotage it entirely. A great aftertaste might sweetly disappear, leaving you clean and satisfied. Or it might linger pleasantly, inviting another sip. What you don't want is harshness emerging at the end.

Balance – Is the coffee harmonious? Is something excessive? Is something missing? Do all the previous attributes enhance each other, or does one dominate? The best coffees hold together from hot to cold, with no single element overwhelming the others.

Overall – The cupper's personal call. Does this coffee have exciting complexity, or is it simple but deeply pleasing? Sometimes the most memorable coffees aren't the flashiest – they're the ones you just can't stop drinking.

Reading the numbers

Once each attribute is scored, those numbers are tallied and 36 points are added to reach a final score out of 100. That +36 isn't arbitrary – it positions the scale so that 'fine' quality sits around the middle, with room to differentiate truly exceptional coffees at the top.

One crucial thing to understand: this scale isn't linear. The jump from 82 to 84 is far easier than the jump from 87 to 89. Each point above 85 represents exponentially more effort – more selective picking, more meticulous processing, more attention at every stage. It's like the difference between running a marathon and running a marathon while shaving minutes off your personal best.

Here's roughly what the numbers mean:

Below 80 – Not speciality grade. You won't find these in our warehouse.

80–85 – Solid speciality coffee. Clean, pleasant, dependable. Most commercial 'specialty' coffee sits here, but we don't tend to buy any coffees under 82 points.

86–87 – This is where Cup of Excellence gets serious. Coffees must score 87 or above to win a CoE award after surviving six rounds of judging. These are genuinely exceptional cups with real complexity.

88–89 – Outstanding quality. Complex, memorable, worth savouring slowly. These coffees made it into the top 30 of an entire country's harvest.

90+ – The Presidential Award tier. We're talking less than 1% of all speciality coffee globally. These lots set auction records. When one appears, we make a fuss about it.

CoE vs SCA: why we use the road less travelled

You'll encounter SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) scores elsewhere – they're the industry's most common standard. Both systems aim to measure quality, but they work quite differently.

The SCA form evaluates 11 attributes on a 6–10 scale: fragrance/aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, clean cup, sweetness, defects, and overall. No base points are added – a coffee needs 80+ to qualify as speciality grade. It's widely used for quality control and green coffee trading around the world.

Cup of Excellence uses 8 attributes on a 0–8 scale, adds those 36 base points, and sets the bar significantly higher. More importantly, a CoE score represents something earned through competition. A coffee scoring 87 has been blind-cupped by up to 35 different judges across six rounds. Only the top 30 coffees in an entire country's harvest make the cut each year.

Here's the practical difference: an SCA score of 85 and a CoE score of 85 don't represent the same thing. CoE scoring tends to be more conservative, particularly at the upper end. A 90+ CoE score is vanishingly rare – the coffee equivalent of a perfect game of darts. You can find SCA 90+ scores on coffee bags fairly regularly; CoE 90+ means you're holding something genuinely historic.

We use CoE because it reflects how we think about coffee: as the product of specific places, specific people, and extraordinary care at every step. And because it's the system our team learned on, standing alongside judges from around the world, cupping thousands of samples in pursuit of something exceptional.

Why any of this matters

Numbers are useful, but they're not the whole story. A score tells you a coffee has been evaluated by professionals and found to be excellent. It gives you confidence that what you're buying has met a high standard.

But flavour is personal. An 88-point washed Ethiopian might not suit someone who loves the earthy depth of Sumatran coffee – and that's perfectly fine. The score tells you it's well-crafted. Whether you love it is entirely up to your palate.

We share these scores because transparency matters – both to you and to the people who grew your coffee. The farmers and producers we work with put extraordinary effort into achieving these results. Every point above 85 represents exponentially more care, precision, and intention: picking at perfect ripeness instead of stripping whole branches, fermenting for exactly the right duration, drying slowly and evenly rather than rushing the process.

When Victor in Bolivia or the Aguilera brothers in Costa Rica see their coffee score well, it validates years of work and investment. These numbers travel back to origin. They matter there too.

If you'd like to try scoring coffee yourself, you can download the official Cup of Excellence cupping form and have a go. It's a brilliant way to train your palate and start noticing things you might otherwise miss.

So next time you see an 87 on one of our coffees, you'll know: this isn't a B+. It's not an abstract quality marker. It's the measurable result of excellence at every step of the journey – and the start of a pretty good cup of coffee.