Altitude, variety, process, SCA score. On a specialty coffee bag, that’s a lot of information for something you just wanted to drink in the morning. The good news is, every line tells you something concrete about what you’ll find in the cup. Once you have the key, you can read it in ten seconds.
Why there’s so much information
A supermarket coffee tells you “arabica” and “intense roast”. That’s it. No way to know where it comes from, or when it was roasted.
With specialty coffee, it works more like a wine label. You know where the coffee grew, who harvested it, how it was processed. Each lot has its own identity, and two coffees from the same country can have absolutely nothing in common.
In concrete terms, the label lets you answer three or four questions before you even open the bag. Will it lean more toward fruit or chocolate? Will the acidity be bright, or are you looking at a rounder profile? Will it work better as espresso or filter? And while we’re at it: why does this bag cost twice as much as the one next to it.
Origin
When you read “Colombia” or “Ethiopia”, you’re only getting the first line of the story. A country is an area as large as France, with dozens of microclimates.
A complete label goes further: the country, the region, often the farm or cooperative, and the producer’s name.
Colombia · Cauca · Finca El Paraíso · Diego Bermúdez
Now you know who we’re talking about. The more precise the origin, the more traceable the coffee is, and the more likely you are to find the same profile again the following year. When a label stops at the country, it’s not necessarily a bad coffee, but no one will be able to tell you who produced it.
Altitude
Example: 1,950 metres.
At higher altitudes, it’s cooler. The cherries ripen more slowly, the bean becomes denser, and the sugars have time to develop. That generally means more aromatic complexity, brighter acidity, and more sweetness. At lower altitudes, you often get a rounder coffee, less lively, sometimes more vegetal.
One small nuance that a lot of people forget: what really matters is temperature, not the number. A Brazilian coffee at 1,200 metres can be excellent because it’s far from the equator, whereas 1,200 metres in Ethiopia would be considered low. Altitude is an indicator of potential, not a rating.
Variety
Like grape varieties in wine, there are hundreds of coffee varieties, each with its own aromas, yield, and resistance to disease.
| Variety | General profile |
|---|---|
| Bourbon | Sweet, balanced, full-bodied |
| Caturra | Mild, fruity, a dwarf Bourbon mutation |
| Typica | Elegant, floral, low yields |
| Geisha | Floral, jasmine, bergamot (rare and expensive) |
| SL28 | Blackcurrant, citrus, the DNA of Kenya |
| Chiroso | Floral, citrus, Colombian |
| Ombligón | Very aromatic, tropical, Colombian |
Variety gives potential, not a guarantee. A poorly fermented or poorly roasted Geisha will always be less good than a Caturra handled with care. That’s also why a Geisha at 12 francs for 250 g deserves a few questions.
The process
The process is what happens to the fruit after harvest. It’s probably the factor that has the biggest influence on the final taste.
Washed. The pulp is removed, then the mucilage is taken off through fermentation and washing before drying. The bean dries bare. Result: a clean cup, marked acidity, precise aromas. It’s the process that lets the terroir and variety speak the most.
Natural. The whole cherry dries around the bean, like a grape turning into a raisin. The fruit and sugars pass into the bean. More ripe fruit, more body, more sweetness. It’s also the riskiest process: if badly dried, it creates very recognisable fermentation defects.
Honey. The pulp is removed but all or part of the mucilage is kept during drying. People talk about yellow, red or black honey depending on how much is left and how much shade there is during drying. In the cup, it lands somewhere in between: the precision of washed, the roundness of natural.
Anaerobic. Careful, this isn’t a fourth process on the same level as the others. It’s a fermentation stage in a sealed tank, without oxygen, which can then be combined with a washed, natural or honey process. It gives very expressive profiles, sometimes spectacular, sometimes divisive. Some find completely new tropical notes in it, others feel the coffee disappears behind the fermentation. Both sides have their arguments.
Tasting notes
You read: peach, black tea, honey.
That obviously doesn’t mean there’s peach in the bag. These are the aromas perceived by the people who tasted the coffee, described with the closest vocabulary we have at hand.
If you can’t pick up the peach, don’t feel bad. Tasting vocabulary is something you learn, and above all these notes shift depending on your brew method, your grind size and the water temperature. The same coffee can come out very floral in V60 and much more chocolatey as an espresso. The notes listed are a direction, not a contract.
The SCA score
The Specialty Coffee Association evaluates coffees out of 100 points, blind, on a green coffee sample roasted for the occasion.
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 80 to 84 | Specialty coffee |
| 85 to 89 | Excellent |
| 90 and above | Exceptional, and rare |
Two things to keep in mind. First, the score evaluates the coffee at a given moment, using a standardised protocol: it says nothing about the freshness of the bag you have in your hands, or the quality of the roast. Second, it doesn’t know your tastes. An 84 with a chocolate-hazelnut profile may well appeal to you infinitely more than a very floral, tangy 89.
For the curious: the SCA has officially adopted a new system, the Coffee Value Assessment, which separates the objective description of the coffee from its evaluation. In commercial practice, the score out of 100 is still the reference everyone uses.
The roast date
It’s the most overlooked piece of information, and probably the most useful day to day.
A freshly roasted coffee degasses, it releases CO2 for several days. If it’s too fresh, it gives an unstable extraction and closed aromas. It needs rest, from several days to several weeks depending on the coffee, the profile, and the machine it was roasted on.
Here, there’s no universal rule, and be wary of anyone giving you a single number. Our coffees, roasted on a Loring, need more time than average before they really open up. That’s also true for naturals and advanced fermentations, which need time to settle. The best test is still yours: taste the same coffee a few days apart, you’ll see when it starts to fully unfold.
After that, the window is pretty comfortable. As beans and in a properly sealed bag, you’re good for one to two months. Beyond that, the coffee doesn’t become bad, it fades, the aromas soften, everything flattens out. Ground coffee, think more in days.
One last reflex: don’t confuse the roast date with the best-before date. A bag that only says “best before December 2027” is hiding when it was roasted.
What should also be on it
Two lines that make all the difference on a good coffee sheet, and that are still far too rare.
The harvest year, because coffee is a seasonal agricultural product. And the roast profile, filter or espresso, because a coffee roasted for filter brewed as espresso will often come out too acidic, and vice versa.
You can also add the price paid to the producer. It’s not a taste detail, but it says the most about how the coffee was bought.
Where to start
Take the bag you opened this morning. Read the whole sheet, all the way through. Then taste it while looking for just one of the notes listed, not all three.
That’s how you learn to read a coffee sheet. Not by memorising charts, but by going back and forth between what’s written and what’s in the cup.
