Say specialty coffee and a certain image probably comes to mind.
A light roast. A V60. Maybe an Ethiopian coffee that tastes suspiciously like peach tea. There may or may not be a very expensive grinder involved.
But none of those things actually defines specialty coffee.
For years, the easiest explanation was this: specialty coffee scores 80 points or higher on a 100-point cupping scale.
You’ll still hear that definition everywhere—from coffee shops to Reddit threads—and it has real history behind it. But there’s a catch: even the Specialty Coffee Association now describes the 80-point rule as a commonly used unofficial definition that doesn’t capture the whole picture.
Today, the SCA defines specialty coffee more broadly.
The basic idea is that a coffee—or the experience around it—has distinctive attributes that people recognise as having meaningful extra value.
That sounds slightly academic, so let’s make it normal.
“Specialty” isn’t a taste
A specialty coffee doesn’t have to taste like berries, jasmine or tropical fruit.
It doesn’t have to be a light roast.
It doesn’t even have to be single origin.
Those things are common in modern specialty coffee because roasters often want to highlight flavours that come from the coffee itself. But they aren’t requirements of the definition.
A sweet, chocolatey coffee can be specialty. So can something bright and floral. So can a carefully constructed blend.
Specialty is about what makes that particular coffee distinctive—not whether it fits a fashionable flavour profile.
And it isn’t just a score anymore
The old 80-point idea was useful because it gave the industry a seemingly simple dividing line between ordinary and higher-quality green coffee.
But coffee is harder to reduce to one number than that.
Two people can taste the same coffee and value different things. One might love its intense acidity. Another might prefer its sweetness and body. A buyer might care about processing or origin. Someone else may place more value on traceability or growing practices.
That thinking is behind the SCA’s newer Coffee Value Assessment, which looks at coffee through several different lenses instead of asking one score to explain everything.
It considers physical characteristics, what the coffee smells and tastes like, how its quality is perceived, and information beyond the cup—such as origin, processing and traceability.
In other words: quality is part of specialty coffee, but specialty is bigger than quality alone.
So what should you look for?
As a coffee drinker, you don’t need to become a Q Grader before buying your next bag.
Look for specificity.
Who produced it? Where was it grown? How was it processed? What variety is it? How has the roaster described the coffee, and does that information actually help you understand what you’re drinking?
Not every specialty coffee needs a biography printed on the bag, and more information doesn’t automatically mean better coffee. But these details can tell you that the coffee has an identity beyond simply being coffee. Origin, producer, processing and other extrinsic attributes are among the characteristics recognised in the SCA’s current value framework.
And that’s probably the easiest way to understand specialty coffee today.
It isn’t a V60.
It isn’t a tasting note.
It isn’t a minimalist café with very good lighting.
It’s coffee with something specific worth noticing.
The point isn’t to make coffee more intimidating.
It’s to make it less anonymous.
Sources
Specialty Coffee Association — What Is Specialty Coffee?
The SCA’s current definition describes specialty through distinctive attributes and the additional value associated with them, rather than through a single sensory score.
Specialty Coffee Association — How Farm Labor Research Shaped the SCA’s Understanding of Specialty Coffee
Explains why the familiar “80 points or higher” rule was an unofficial and incomplete way of defining specialty coffee, and how the attributes-based approach developed.
Specialty Coffee Association — Coffee Value Assessment
Details the current physical, descriptive, affective and extrinsic approaches used to understand and communicate coffee value.
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