What "specialty" actually means
Fundamentals · Grading
What "specialty" actually means
It's on £6 supermarket bags and £25 roaster bags alike. It has a real definition — and borders blurrier than most people realise.
8 min read
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The word is on every bag in the third wave — on cheap supermarket coffee and expensive roaster coffee alike — which is exactly why it's worth knowing that it isn't marketing. Specialty is a grade, with a number behind it and a line you either clear or you don't. What that line measures, where it stops measuring well, and what any of it means when you're standing in front of a shelf trying to spend your money well — that's what this is about.
01 — The grade
The 80-point line
Specialty is not a marketing word; it's a grade. The Specialty Coffee Association keeps a 100-point protocol that licensed tasters — Q Graders — use to score green coffee, and a coffee is specialty grade if, and only if, it clears 80 points. Below the line it's commodity, whatever the packaging says. Above it the number keeps climbing, and the higher it goes, the rarer — and dearer — the coffee gets.
The bands don't feel evenly spaced in the cup. The jump from a 79 to an 82 is night and day; the jump from an 88 to a 90 is real but subtle, and the price moves far faster than the flavour does. Past the low nineties you're into competition and auction lots, where a single pound of green coffee can cost more than a good grinder.
02 — The scorecard
How the score is built
A cupper rates ten things about the coffee, each on a scale that tops out at ten, then takes defects off at the end — a single sour bean, a quaker, a black bean, and the lot loses two whole points. Add it up and you have the score. The maximum is a hundred; the realistic ceiling is around ninety-five, and coffees above that are vanishingly rare.
| Attribute | What it asks |
| Fragrance / aroma | How the dry grounds and the wet crust smell |
| Flavour | The main event — what the coffee actually tastes of |
| Aftertaste | What lingers, and whether it's pleasant |
| Acidity | Brightness and liveliness, not sourness |
| Body | Weight and texture in the mouth |
| Balance | Whether the parts add up to a whole |
| Uniformity | Do the cups taste the same as each other |
| Clean cup | Freedom from off-flavours and taints |
| Sweetness | A marker of ripe, well-processed fruit |
| Overall | The taster's considered, whole judgement |
None of it is magic, and none of it is fully objective. Cleanliness and defects are close to measurable; balance and "overall" leave room for honest disagreement. That's why two good graders can land three points apart on the same cup and both be right — the score is a careful opinion, not a reading off a meter.
03 — At origin
Why the line matters
The reason the line matters most has little to do with your cupboard and everything to do with the farm. Before Q grading arrived in 2004, a producer in Ethiopia and a buyer in London had no shared language for quality — no agreed way to say this lot is better than that one. Now they do: a coffee is an 86, or it isn't. And an 86 earns a premium a 79 doesn't, even when the two beans came off the same plant. The difference is selection, careful picking and processing discipline — precisely the work that lifts a lot from commodity to specialty, and the grading is what pays a producer to do it.
That floor is the clean part of the system. The trouble starts higher up. The protocol was written when most coffee was washed and judged on balance and cleanliness, and it handles modern experimental processing badly: a wild anaerobic natural splits a table, scored 92 for character by one judge and marked down for being atypical by the next. It also captures nothing of the economics. A clean 86 from a smallholder in Burundi is, by any fair measure, a greater achievement than a 92 from a lavishly resourced estate — and the number says nothing of it. A useful floor, in other words, and an imperfect ruler above it.
04 — In the cup
What it means for you
Legally the word is unprotected, so in a supermarket "specialty" has drifted into a generic premium sticker — covering everything from a real 85-point lot to a commodity blend in nicer paper. Among serious roasters it still means something, and there's an easy test. A roaster who claims specialty and prints the receipts — country, region, farm, variety, process, often the score and the producer's name — is working inside the system. One who claims it and prints nothing is using the word as decoration.
Every coffee on our shelf is specialty grade. Most sit in the 86–89 range; our Geishas and reserve releases clear 90. We publish the cup scores on our transparency report and on product pages where we have them — not because the number is the point, but because printing it means accepting the scrutiny that comes with it.
For you at home, treat the score as a direction, not a ranking. The gap between an 87 and an 88 will tell you far less than the words beside it — jasmine, bergamot, peach — about whether a bag is for you. Where the number earns its keep is as an audit: if you're paying £25 for a Geisha and no score is published, it's fair to ask why. And keep the score in its place — it's the floor, not the whole building. A 92 that's three months past roast tastes worse than an honest 86 that's three days old; freshness, process, origin and the person brewing all still get the final word.
So that's what specialty means: a real line, doing real work at the farm, and a useful-if-imperfect ruler above it. Treat the number as the start of the answer, and the rest of the bag — the roast date, the farm, the process, the honesty of the label — as the rest of it. Everything worth drinking clears the line; the single origins below all do.