What Is Specialty Coffee and Where to Get It
This post was last updated on May 26th, 2022
Coffee is a favorite beverage for many people. So, if you’re a certified coffee lover, you would like to select the best beans that you can get your hands on. However, most people pause when asked if the drink they’re having is gourmet or specialty. This is most likely because they don’t understand the difference.
Specialty coffee is the name used for the best grades of coffee, usually for the full supply chain through single-origin coffee mostly supplied by a Specialty Coffee Club.
It’s a sophisticated coffee-based beverage identified to be of superior value and providing a distinct and exceptional flavor and personality as opposed to standard coffee-based drinks. It should originate from green coffee cultivated in suitable environments and must meet a range of elevated criteria for its manufacturing, treatment, roasting, preservation, and preparation. Visit Coffee Prices, a one-stop shop for coffee enthusiasts.
The Specialty Coffee Association
The SCA stands for the Specialty Coffee Association. It is a member-based organization representing coffee experts whose primary aim is to promote great coffee.
The Technicalities of Specialty Coffee
SCA scores coffee beans out of one hundred with a standardized testing method called “cupping”. As per the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), Arabica coffee is tagged as specialty coffee with a rating of 80 + points.
A Q grader will cup the coffee. Several flaws in a batch of unroasted coffee beans are immediately disqualified from gaining the “specialty” signature. This criterion establishes “specialty” coffee and “gourmet” apart from each other, which lacks a comprehensive definition. The latter might be high-quality coffee, or it might just be advertising.
The People Behind Your Specialty Coffee
Before you can take a sip of your coffee from the Specialty Coffee Club, it will move through the care of multiple people first.
- Farmer
Cultivated in carefully chosen altitudes and climatic conditions, the producer of specialty coffee dedicates his life to optimizing and mastering the best quality coffee. For them, value, not quantity, is perhaps the most critical factor.
- The Green Coffee Buyer
They then send green coffee to the Green Coffee Buyer accredited by SCA as a Certified Coffee Taster or the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) as a registered Q Grader. They have quite a palate as defined as a food critic and therefore can distinguish the value of coffee through cupping or sampling of brewed coffee.
- The Roaster
Top-tier coffees are then transported to the SCA-certified coffee roaster, which has finished several hours of coursework and hands-on mentoring to roast the specialty bean masterfully. Coffee roasting is an art that needs a sophisticated understanding and expertise in the production of specialized roast profiles.
- The Barista
When specialty coffee products have reached the commercial landscape, they have now completed three stages of evaluation to guarantee maximum quality. Then, the barista accredited by the SCA to have undergone several hours of study and hands-on training is the ultimate coffee specialist to fulfill the life-cycle of the specialty bean.
Where to Buy Specialty Coffee
Now that you understand all about specialty coffee, here are the most exceptional locations to get them:
- Cafes — Specialty coffee shops have beans accessible for purchase from their roasting partners. Variety is strictly limited, and it’s not always as fresh as possible.
- Roasters — Most roasters have facilities that offer freshly roasted coffee. It’s a great resource to maintain freshness, but it still restricts you to the origins obtained by a single roaster.
- Online — Purchasing beans through the web is opening up a diversified world of coffee foundations and tastes that very few roasters can achieve. Unfortunately, only a few online stores offer roasted-to-order coffee.
- Specialty Coffee Club — They originate from the most respected and comprehensive coffee competitions. They’re also teaming up with the finest expert roasters in the globe. Therefore, almost all of their collections are among the rarest and most highly regarded Arabica coffees in the world.
Enjoy that cup of specialty coffee because you deserve it!
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