What Is a Coffee Cupping Score? The SCA 100-Point Scale Explained
When a bag advertises "92 points," that number comes from a specific, standardized evaluation — not a marketing claim. Here's exactly how SCA cupping scores work, what the grade bands actually mean, and the highest-scoring coffees in our own catalog.
How SCA Cupping Actually Works
The Specialty Coffee Association's cupping protocol scores a brewed sample across 10 categories — fragrance/aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, uniformity, clean cup, and overall impression — each rated from 6 to 10, usually in quarter-point increments. The categories sum to the final score out of 100.
Trained evaluators called Q Graders, certified by the Coffee Quality Institute, are the industry's independent standard for this — though not every published score comes from one; some are the roaster's or exporter's own in-house cupping team. The scale is also non-linear: moving from 82 to 83 is a much smaller jump in cup quality than moving from 87 to 88, since each additional point gets progressively harder to earn as defects approach zero and distinctiveness has to carry the rest.
What the Score Bands Mean
For coffee to qualify as "specialty" at all, its sample must show zero primary defects and fewer than five secondary defects, and score 80 or above. Above that floor, the SCA groups scores into three bands:
Of the 38 coffees in our own catalog with a published score (out of 619 total, from 11 roasters), the average is 89.2 and every single one clears 85 — roasters who bother publishing a cupping score tend to only do it for lots that are already well above the 80-point specialty floor.
Our Highest-Scoring Coffees
Ranked by published SCA score, then by our own star rating as a tiebreaker.
