By Rachel Beebe
I recently passed the exams to become an Arabica Q Grader: a professional qualified to assess arabica coffee and give it a quality score. As in wine, quality scores determine the price a coffee may sell at. Awarded by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI), the certification is a way of ensuring global alignment on coffee standards. It’s the most respected professional certification in coffee and, with a first time pass rate of less than 50 percent, it’s notoriously difficult.
This experience stretched me to find my physical and mental limits and helped me to push them. It’s like bootcamp for cupping skills. The course lasts six days in which there’s a blend of lecture, practice and exams. A typical exam day consists of tasting 96 individual cups, plus other tests to identify specific aromas, acids or tastes. By day four I was navigating a bizarre combination of heightened aroma sensitivity, exam stress, caffeine highs and crashes, overall sensory overload, general fatigue and the geeky thrill of being around so many other coffee professionals. That week I was so immersed that I forgot my brother’s birthday on Monday. And my Mom’s on Thursday.
My five whys
Before I committed to pursuing this goal I did an exercise called “the five whys” to clarify my motivation. If I was going to put myself through the expense of it all, both financially and emotionally, I needed to be sure that it was truly relevant and important to me. I asked myself, five times over, why I wanted to do it. By the time I got past the surface level reasons, I reached my fifth:
I want to pursue a goal that will get me fired up in the morning and also help me move toward a professional role that is more impactful in the world.
The truth is, I had been considering getting out of coffee and retraining in something that felt more purposeful, or at least less problematic. When you start looking closely at the coffee industry you quickly realise that (like a lot of things we do) it’s not sustainable. It can be extractive and exploitative. And to make matters worse, specialty coffee is marketed on the promise that we can do it better, pay farmers more, kill the Earth less. That can be true in specific situations. But, specialty coffee is such a small proportion of the global coffee market both volume-wise and value-wise, that the overall impact is inconsequential.
Cynicism aside, I still had reservations about committing. First, the cost is prohibitive. The fee is usually about £2,000, and by the time you’ve added practice materials, training sessions, accommodation and travel, you (or, if you're lucky, your employer) is paying that twice over.
The second biggest challenge was finding good information about what would be on the tests and how to prepare, which was harder than you’d think. The gatekeeping around information on how to prepare is really frustrating and doesn’t make much sense. Some CQI instructors offer introductory level classes on cupping and sensory analysis, but they are few and far between. To my mind, offering a training plan and materials would encourage a lot more people to sign up.
Cup through it
In the end I spent about two months doing two or three practice sessions a week outside of work, plus four to five additional hours most weeks training with two different certified Q Graders and two other roasters. My first practice sessions were awful. Failure after failure. Here’s a few journal entries:
On scoring coffee: There was one coffee that the others could tell tasted really old and baggy. I thought it was clean and overall pleasant. I loved the acidity in another one and they all said the acidity was poorly structured. I have no idea what that means.
On olfactory training: Feck these sugar browning ones are hard. I’m so frustrated I can’t identify vanilla. Vanilla, for Christ’s sake!
On identifying acids: Ok, this is going to be tricky. Maybe I’ve got my solutions too weak?? First try and I changed my answers three times before getting two out of three wrong.
Acids Training Kit
Le Nez Olfactory Training Kit
What even is quality?
The 20 exams include nine that are designed to test specific sensory abilities like identifying aromas and tastes; four triangulations that test your ability to distinguish one coffee from another; two tests on grading coffee beans for defects and one general knowledge exam. But the real heart of Q are the four cupping exams. Each table includes six coffees ranging in quality from non-specialty to high specialty. Your task is to score them accurately using the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) cupping form.
Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) cupping form
At first I really hated the cupping form. For me, tasting coffee is an expansive, dynamic experience. The cupping form seemed to flatten it to a mere numerical value; an unequivocal confirmation of worth. Maybe I’m verging on hyperbole here, but that kind of quantitative, value-obsessed lens is responsible for a lot of what’s wrong in the world.
A more level headed criticism is that it’s futile to attempt to apply objectivity to a sensory experience, which is so clearly subjective. CQI disputes this. Their raison d'etre is based on the principle that quality is objective and immutable. Only Q Graders without a commercial interest in a coffee can give it a CQI score. And for a coffee to receive a score it must be cupped by three Q Graders and their scores averaged. Many of the scores we see in the industry, on samples from importers and on retail bags from boutique roasteries, don’t hold a lot of meaning. Anyone can use the SCA cupping form to score a coffee. And any individual Q Grader can score a coffee. Neither of these scores are valid in the eyes of CQI.
This is where calibration comes in. When we cup together and calibrate, it’s like we’re a scale. We all learn what a 7.0 and 8.0 and 9.0 taste like, and from then on, we’re able to measure all coffees against those standards. Additionally, if we all taste a solution and name that flavour “chocolate” then we’re all in agreement about what chocolate means.
It’s actually a little bonkers to see how well this works in practice. I’ve calibrated in groups where eventually we’re all scoring each attribute to within 0.5 points of each other. Having read studies that show that the colour of the cup can predictably influence our perception of its attributes, knowing that I have off days depending on where I am in my cycle and experiencing firsthand the many biases that influence us as cuppers, I was hesitant to believe in any kind of true quality score.
But the point is, there isn’t a “true” score for each coffee. There’s a score that’s correct because it’s within a reasonable deviation of the average scores given by other Q Graders.
Maybe I’ve been slightly brainwashed but I can see now why the cupping form is a good tool. It was created to appreciate the work producers put into their coffee. The scores for different components must be backed up by qualitative information and descriptors, and they work to build a total score that is defensible and takes all the sensory attributes of the coffee into account. I was told by instructors on two occasions, imagine the farmer is standing there when you’re cupping their coffee. You’d better be able to explain your assessment.
Go time
Despite all my preparation I failed three of the exams the first time I sat them. In fact, no one on that course passed, so I didn’t feel too bad. I also had the most fantastic time, learned a ton and made strong connections with the others on my course. It became crystal clear what things I needed to practice. I decided to put a little more work in to build up those skills and the second time I sat those exams they were a piece of cake.
Cupping is like any physical skill: it can be developed through practice. Conversely if you don’t do it, you’ll lose it. Even after four days off from work I start to get a little rusty. I totally missed a mold taint the other day. It’s so humbling.
And what of my fifth why? The mission of CQI is to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of the people producing it. So, if I was looking to pursue meaning, CQI could maybe open a path toward that. For example, to get fair prices, producers need to be able to assess the value of their own coffee. CQI has run several producer oriented programs to provide this training.
As prices spike and the market struggles to adjust, Nick Mabey’s analysis that “specialty coffee’s rise was less about transformation and more about optics” seems pretty apt. But I also know from working with people I trust and admire that it’s not all performative and there are ethically sound ways of operating. Mabey argues that the industry needs systemic change to build in fair price discovery, equitable value distribution and producer empowerment; perhaps CQI’s system of quality assessment can be a part of that project. For now I’ll hold my nerve, continue to try to look squarely at the problems inherent in our industry and do my best to make great coffee.
Rachel with her Arabica Q Grader certificate