You've spotted the numbers on our coffee pages. An 87 here, an 89 there. Here's what sits behind one of them: eight attributes, six rounds of blind cupping, and somewhere between 26 and 36 judges who never saw the bag.
Cupping scores are the industry's attempt to put flavour into numbers. A bit like rating a sunset out of 100. Slightly absurd, and surprisingly useful when you're trying to communicate quality across continents and languages.
Why we use Cup of Excellence
We score against Cup of Excellence rather than the SCA form, for two reasons.
The first is the process. A CoE score isn't one person's opinion on one morning. It's six rounds of blind cupping: pre-selection and two national jury rounds in the producing country, then three more with an international jury flown in. Coffees need 86 points or above to survive each stage. Only the top 30 scoring 87 or higher from the international jury are awarded a Cup of Excellence. Coffees landing between 85 and 86.99 become National Winners and go to a separate auction. Everything else goes home.
The second reason is closer to home. Has Bean founder Steve Leighton spent years on CoE international juries. His first origin trip, back in 2004, was to judge Cup of Excellence in Nicaragua. Our Green Buyer, Roland Glew, has served on international juries too. Spend a week calibrating your palate next to the best cuppers in the world and the system becomes second nature. It stuck.
What the judges actually score
The CoE form has eight scored attributes, each marked at 0, 4, 6, 7 or 8. Aroma gets recorded as well, dry, on the crust and on the break, but it carries no points. Defects are subtracted: number of affected cups, multiplied by intensity, multiplied by four.
Clean cup
The foundation for everything else. It goes past being free of defects and into clarity. Can you tell the flavours apart? Are the acidity, the sweetness and the mouthfeel each apparent and separate, or does the whole thing blur? A clean cup has no off-tastes, no dirty notes, nothing harsh or astringent muddying the picture. It's the transparency that lets everything else come through.
Sweetness
This tracks how uniformly ripe the cherry was at harvest. Ripe cherries, yes, but consistently ripe cherries across the whole pick. Sweetness is the combined impression of several components working together rather than a measure of sugar content, and it's the reward for patience and precision at the tree.
Acidity
What brightens a coffee and gives it life. In wine you'd call it nerve, or backbone. The important part: judges score the quality of the acidity, not the quantity. A coffee can be gentle and still score well. What matters is whether the acidity is refined and pleasant or harsh and biting. Is there a crisp snap, or does it fall flat?
Mouthfeel
The tactile side. 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 scores just as well as a heavy one when the mouthfeel is well executed.
Flavour
Taste and aroma combined, and where a fine coffee stands out. The question judges ask is whether this tastes of a place, of care, of craft, or whether it's generic. Plenty of flavours are pleasant and reproducible anywhere. The best coffees offer something that couldn't have come from anywhere else.
Aftertaste
What happens after you swallow either reinforces everything that came before or sabotages it. A great aftertaste might disappear sweetly, leaving you clean and satisfied. It might linger and invite another sip. What you don't want is harshness arriving at the end.
Balance
Is the coffee harmonious? Is something excessive, or missing? Do the other attributes lift each other, or does one dominate? The best coffees hold together from hot right down to cold.
Overall
The cupper's personal call. Does this coffee have real complexity, or is it simple and deeply pleasing? Some of the most memorable coffees are the ones you can't stop drinking rather than the ones that show off.
How the score is built
Eight attributes at a maximum of 8 each gives you 64. Add 36 and you land on 100. That's all the 36 does: it maps one scale onto another that everyone already reads.
The scale isn't linear, though, and this is the part worth holding onto. Going from 82 to 84 is far easier than going from 87 to 89. Every point above 85 costs more selective picking, more careful processing, more attention at every stage. It's the difference between finishing a marathon and taking two minutes off your best time.
What the numbers mean
Below 80. Not specialty grade. You won't find these in our warehouse.
80 to 85. Solid specialty coffee. Clean, pleasant, dependable. Most commercial specialty sits here. We don't tend to buy under 82.
86. The score a coffee needs to keep advancing through the CoE rounds. Good coffee that ran out of road.
87 and above. Cup of Excellence territory, and only after six rounds of blind cupping. In competitions run as a single table, that's the top 30 of everything a country entered. In the multi-category format now used in Brazil and El Salvador, it's the top ten of each of three categories.
90 and above. The Presidential Award. These lots set auction records, and when one lands with us we make a fuss about it.
Cup of Excellence and the SCA
You'll see SCA scores elsewhere, and that side of things has changed more than most people realise.
For twenty years the SCA used a single 100-point cupping form, published in 2004. Ten scored attributes. The quality ones, fragrance and aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance and overall, were rated from 6 to 10 in quarter points. Uniformity, clean cup and sweetness were scored per cup. Defects came off the total, and 80 points marked the line into specialty. That's the form most people picture when they hear "SCA score".
It's been retired. In November 2024 the SCA adopted three new standards under the Coffee Value Assessment and formally superseded the 2004 protocol. A fourth, covering extrinsic attributes, followed, with updated forms published in October 2025.
The CVA splits evaluation into four parts instead of one. A physical assessment of the green coffee: moisture, defects, size, colour. A descriptive assessment recording what the coffee tastes of, rated for intensity rather than quality. An affective assessment covering how much the taster rates it, which is where the score comes from. And an extrinsic assessment for everything outside the cup, from traceability to certification.
Pulling description apart from judgement is the clever bit. On the old form, "flavour 8.5" could mean the flavour was intense, or complex, or simply that the cupper liked it, and different people used the scale differently. The CVA asks you to describe on one form and rate on another. It's a thoughtful piece of work and we're glad the industry is moving towards a fuller picture of quality.
Cup of Excellence does something different again. Eight attributes on a 0 to 8 scale, plus the 36, judged competitively rather than in isolation. That last part carries the most weight. An SCA or CVA score is one evaluation of one coffee. A CoE score is a coffee that beat everything else its country submitted that year, assessed by 10 to 12 national judges and then 16 to 24 international ones.
So an 85 on the old SCA form and an 85 at Cup of Excellence aren't the same claim. CoE scoring runs more conservative, particularly at the upper end, and a CoE score carries a ranking with it.
One thing worth saying plainly, because it often gets overstated: 90+ at Cup of Excellence isn't vanishingly rare. Eight coffees cleared 90 at the 2026 El Salvador competition. Five did in Brazil in 2022. It sits at the very top of what the format recognises and it moves auction prices hard, but it happens somewhere every year.
Why any of this matters
Numbers are useful without being the whole story. A score tells you a coffee has been assessed by professionals and found to be excellent. It gives you confidence that what you're buying met a high standard.
Flavour is still personal, though. An 88-point washed Ethiopian might do nothing for someone who loves the earthy depth of a Sumatran, and that's fine. The score tells you it's well made. Whether you love it is down to your palate.
We publish these scores because transparency matters, to you and to the people who grew the coffee. Every point above 85 represents 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 it.
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 want to try it yourself, the Cup of Excellence cupping form is a free download. Eight boxes, five marks each. It's the fastest way we know to start noticing things in a cup you'd otherwise drink straight past.