What is Specialty Coffee? The Simple Explainer
What is Specialty Coffee? The Simple Explainer Article
‘Specialty coffee’ appears on menus, bags, and websites everywhere. It’s become a term that works more as marketing than information — freely applied to anything that costs more than supermarket coffee.
So here’s what it really means.
The Technical Definition
Specialty coffee is formally defined by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as coffee that scores 80 points or more on a standardised 100-point quality scale.
The scale assesses: fragrance, aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, cleanliness, and sweetness. Coffees are scored by licensed Q Graders — professional tasters who’ve passed a rigorous exam.
- Under 80 points: Commodity coffee (supermarket, pods)
- 80–84.99: Specialty coffee
- 85–89.99: Excellent specialty coffee
- 90+: Outstanding / world class
Most coffee sold worldwide is never formally scored. Most specialty coffee brands are honest about the designation, but not all.
What Makes Specialty Coffee Different
Where it’s grown: Altitude, soil, microclimate. Specialty coffee tends to come from higher altitudes (800m+), where cherries mature slower and develop more complex flavours. Regions like Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and India’s Western Ghats have the geography to produce it.
How it’s picked: Specialty coffee is typically hand-picked with selective harvesting — only ripe cherries, unripe ones are left on the branch. This is labour-intensive. Commodity coffee uses strip picking (everything comes off at once, ripe and unripe together).
How it’s processed: The method by which coffee cherries turn into dried beans dramatically impacts the flavour. Washed (fermented to remove the fruit) produces clean, bright, acidic coffee. Natural (dried with the fruit on) produces fruity, complex coffee. Both are used in the specialty industry.
How it’s roasted: Specialty roasters generally roast lighter, to preserve the natural flavour characteristics of the origin. Darker roasts can mask defects — which is why cheap coffee is often dark.
What This Means At nymo
Choc the Bean is based on specialty grade beans from Kodagu, India — EU organic and UTZ certified, shade grown at altitude, hand-picked, and washed.
Our Choc the Bean fits these standards exactly — hand-picked & drum-roasted.
The flavour profile (dark chocolate, hazelnut, nougat) isn’t an added flavour. It’s what the bean naturally produces when grown in that soil, at that altitude, and roasted to the right profile.
That’s what specialty coffee really means: a traceable, measurable difference in the cup.