What is specialty coffee?

Specialty coffee is, in the simplest terms, coffee that has been graded as high quality. The widely used definition comes from the Specialty Coffee Association: a green coffee that scores 80 points or higher on a 100-point quality scale, judged by trained tasters. That score is shorthand for “this coffee is clean, well made, and tastes of something specific.”

What the score actually measures

The grade comes from a formal tasting called cupping. Trained graders score the coffee on things like acidity, body, sweetness, balance, and aftertaste, and they deduct points for defects such as sourness from over-fermentation or moldy, musty, or rotten beans. A coffee with serious defects cannot reach 80, no matter how nice the origin sounds. See scoring-and-q-grading and cupping-protocol for how the grading works.

More than just a number

Specialty is not only about the score. In practice it usually means:

• Traceability. You can often see the country, region, farm or cooperative, varietal, and process on the bag.
• Care at every stage. Ripe cherries picked by hand, careful processing, and roasting tuned to bring out flavor rather than hide it.
• Distinct flavor. Instead of a generic “coffee” taste, specialty coffee tends to have a clear character: berry, citrus, chocolate, floral, and so on.

How it differs from regular coffee

Most coffee sold in supermarkets is commodity coffee: bought and sold by the sack as an interchangeable grade, blended for consistency and price rather than character. It is not “bad,” but it is not selected or scored for flavor. Specialty coffee sits at the opposite end: chosen for quality, priced higher, and meant to taste of where it came from.

If you are new, you do not need to memorize the scale. Just know that “specialty” on a bag is a signal that someone graded the coffee for quality and can usually tell you where it came from. To step back further, see what-is-coffee.