SCA Fine Coffee Association said: coffee flavor wheel and cup meter will have a new reform!

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"The SCA cup meter, widely used by the global coffee industry to measure coffee value, has not been updated for a long time. In the twenty years since this chart was invented, the coffee industry has changed dramatically, and sensory science has evolved.

Now that more and more people are asking for sweetness to be added to the SCA cup scale as part of the sensory evaluation of coffee, we realize it's time to change the sensory evaluation of the scale."

Mario Fernandez, technical officer of SCA Fine Coffee Association, shared this message at a reception at the estate following the successful conclusion of this year's BOP Best Panama competition.

Mario comes from a Mexican coffee-growing family. Before taking up his position as SCA Technical Officer in 2020, he has been researching how coffee can be understood through a food science lens. Earlier this year, Mario discussed the idea of redefining and evaluating coffee attributes at Re: co, a conference that brings together players with deep research and influence in the specialty coffee space to conduct in-depth discussions and drive innovation to lead the industry.

When judging whether a cup of coffee is good or bad through the senses, three questions cannot be separated: Can you drink the difference? What flavor can you drink? Do you like it personally? These three questions involve discriminative judgment, descriptive judgment, and affective judgment.

In sensory science, it is highly undesirable to mix up three different types of sensory evaluations because it is difficult to make all three fairly at the same time. However, there are cases in the existing SCA Cup scale where three different types of sensory assessment items are put together.

Among them,"Body thickness" and "Balance" use emotional judgment,"uniformity" uses discriminative judgment, and "Intensity overall intensity" uses descriptive judgment.

Mario says solving this problem requires a gap between descriptive judgment and emotional judgment assessment. SCA has worked with the World Senses Institute to develop a new cupping scale.

In the original cup test table, descriptive vocabulary and some additional key questions were added to develop a new coffee value evaluation system from five comprehensive perspectives: green bean grade, descriptive judgment (used to judge the flavor performance in coffee), emotional judgment (used to judge personal impression of coffee quality), external attributes, and discovery value.

With these spaced items, favoritism due to the mixing of the three types can be greatly reduced, and people can be more aware of their own judgments of each type and give more fair scores. At present, the SCA cup meter reform scheme is still under discussion and improvement, and has not yet begun to be used externally.

In terms of coffee flavor wheel, Mario said that many of the flavor references in the coffee flavor wheel now come from North America, which does not allow people in all regions to use the descriptions as references.

Some of these words cannot be translated into more languages, so there are large differences in descriptive judgments between people in different regions for the same coffee rating.

Therefore, SCA and the World Senses Institute, Coffee Science Foundation are collating flavor references that can be used globally and making more translations that can be integrated into different regional cultures.

In addition to the SCA cup meter and coffee flavor round changes, Mario also said at the estate reception that SCA intends to widen the difference between specialty coffee and commercial coffee scores.

The idea is that fine coffee will get higher scores, and bad coffee will get lower scores, such as 80 now, and 75 later, or even lower. Mario said that this situation does not represent a decline in coffee quality, but only a change in judgment standards and concepts, so the score will be lower.

Image Source: Internet