Coffee Value Assessment (CVA)
The Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) is the Specialty Coffee Association’s current system for evaluating coffee. The SCA describes it in its own words as “the Specialty Coffee Association’s system and tool for evaluating coffee,” one that “offers a high-resolution picture of each coffee’s attributes, helping to understand why a coffee is valuable, and to which markets” (SCA — Coffee Value Assessment, accessed 2026-07-23).
The short version of what changed: the industry used to reduce a coffee to one number. A trained taster filled in a single cupping form and the coffee came out the other side as “86.5” or “91” — see Coffee scoring. CVA breaks that apart into four separate assessments that are recorded, and can be read, independently.
The four assessments
The SCA’s CVA page names four components, each answering a different question (SCA, accessed 2026-07-23):
| Component | What it looks at | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Physical | Colour, defects, moisture content, bean size — the green coffee itself, before anyone tastes it | What condition is this coffee in? |
| Descriptive (SCA-103) | Aroma, flavour, texture, aftertaste, recorded “using standardized language” | What does it taste like? |
| Affective (SCA-104) | The evaluator’s “impression of coffee quality, related to their personal preference or the preferences of their market” | How much do I — or my buyers — like it? |
| Extrinsic (SCA-105) | “Information beyond the cup that adds value, such as certifications, origin traceability, and processing information” | What else about this coffee is worth paying for? |
A fifth standard, SCA-102: Sample Preparation and Tasting Mechanics, sits underneath all of them — it fixes how the sample is roasted, ground, and served so that two people in two countries are tasting the same thing.
The split between descriptive and affective is the intellectually important one, and it is easy to miss. Describing a coffee as intensely floral with a syrupy body is an observation other tasters can check. Saying that floral syrupy coffee is excellent is a preference — one that a Nordic filter roaster and an Italian espresso house will answer differently about the same cup. The old single score jammed both into one number. CVA insists they are different measurements.
The extrinsic assessment is the genuinely new territory: it puts organic certification, traceability back to a named farm, or an unusual fermentation on the evaluation form as things that carry value, rather than treating them as marketing that happens after the tasting.
You don’t have to use all of it
CVA is modular. The SCA’s framing is that it “combines four complementary assessment types to capture a full picture of coffee’s value,” and that an evaluator can run one or all of them depending on need. A green buyer screening arrival samples may only ever fill in the descriptive and affective forms; a certifier might care mostly about the extrinsic side.
That modularity is also the honest answer to “so what’s the CVA score?” There isn’t one headline number in the way there was before. Quality comes out as a profile across several linked assessments.
Where it sits in the wider system
- All five standards are published. The SCA’s standards page lists SCA-102, SCA-103, SCA-104 and SCA-105 as published standards under a “Coffee Value Assessment” heading, alongside SCA-710: Coffee Evaluator — Professional Competencies, which defines what a person doing this work is expected to be able to do (SCA — Coffee Standards, accessed 2026-07-23).
- It anchors the licence. The Q Grader course is now built around CVA — the SCA expects candidates to arrive already familiar with it.
- The physical side inherits from 2004. The SCA states the physical assessment is based on the 2004 SCA green coffee grading system, so the oldest layer of the framework was carried forward rather than rewritten.
- A green coffee standard is still being written. SCA-110 (Green Coffee — grading, specifications, test methods) is listed as in development, which means the physical half of CVA is the part most likely to change next.
Why it matters
The single 100-point score is a remarkably efficient piece of infrastructure: it lets a buyer in Tokyo commit money to a lot in Panama they have never tasted. Everything on this wiki that involves a price — Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the record-breaking auction lots — runs on that number travelling reliably.
CVA’s bet is that the number was carrying too much. “91 points” silently mixed what the coffee is with how much this particular jury liked it and left out everything the buyer couldn’t taste. Splitting those apart should make the assessment more useful to more markets at once — at the cost of being longer, more complicated, and no longer collapsible into a single figure a headline can print.
Whether the auction world actually adopts it is the open question. Competition results on this wiki are still quoted as single scores.
To verify — the "‑2024" standard designations and the adoption date
Daily Coffee News reported that in November 2024 the SCA formally adopted CVA as three standards numbered 102‑2024, 103‑2024 and 104‑2024, and that this “effectively replaces” the cupping form and protocol first published by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) in 2004 (Daily Coffee News, 5 Nov 2024 — cited via the research report; the page returned HTTP 403 when fetched on 2026-07-23, so the wording could not be confirmed at the source). Two things do not line up with what the SCA’s own site shows today. First, the SCA standards page lists the standards without year suffixes and without publication dates, so “102‑2024” could not be confirmed as the official designation. Second, that report described CVA as three standards; the SCA now publishes four (102, 103, 104 and 105 Extrinsic Assessment), so 105 was either published later or omitted from the report. The research report itself was unsure whether SCA-105 existed as a formal standard — it does, per the SCA’s own standards page. The 2004 date for the legacy cupping form is consistent with a second, independent source: CQI’s Q Grader FAQ says it “will continue to use the 2004 cupping form” (see Q Grader). Note this is the cupping form; the SCA separately dates its green grading system to 2004 as well.
To verify — the launch timeline and translated forms
A buyer’s guide published by Ethiocoffee states that CVA was “officially launched in phases since 2023,” that revised protocols followed Early Adopter feedback in June 2024, and that updated forms were released in seven languages in October 2025 — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese (Ethiocoffee — SCA Coffee Value Assessment: Buyer’s Guide, accessed 2026-07-23). This is a single secondary commercial source; none of these dates appear on the SCA pages read here. Treat the phased-2023 start and the October 2025 language release as reported, not confirmed. The 2023 date is also flagged separately in Q Grader, where the SCA page that supposedly carried it now returns 404.
To verify — the industry criticism
The research report attributes to Sweet Maria’s, a US green coffee seller, a critique calling the new form “maximalist and totalizing” for pulling extrinsic factors into evaluation (Sweet Maria’s — “The new coffee cupping form nobody asked for”, cited via the research report). The page was not fetched, so the exact quote is unverified. It is opinion from a commercial party either way — recorded here because it is a fair summary of the main objection to CVA’s scope, not because it settles anything.
Related
- Cupping · Coffee scoring · Q Grader · Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute
- Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence — the competitions whose results are still quoted as single scores
- Premiumisation · Anaerobic fermentation · Honey process — the kind of extrinsic and processing information CVA’s SCA-105 puts on the form
Official links
- Official site — SCA Coffee Value Assessment
- Official site — SCA Coffee Standards (102, 103, 104, 105)
Sources
- SCA — Coffee Value Assessment — accessed 2026-07-23
- SCA — Coffee Standards — accessed 2026-07-23
- SCA — Specialty Coffee Association — accessed 2026-07-23
- SCA — A System to Assess Coffee Value, June 2024 (PDF) — returned 404 on fetch, accessed 2026-07-23
- Daily Coffee News — SCA officially adopts new cupping forms and standards — returned 403 on fetch; cited via research report, accessed 2026-07-23
- Ethiocoffee — SCA Coffee Value Assessment: Buyer’s Guide — secondary commercial source, accessed 2026-07-23
- Royal Coffee New York — How to use the SCA CVA form — secondary; cited via research report, accessed 2026-07-23
- Sweet Maria’s — The new coffee cupping form nobody asked for — opinion; cited via research report, accessed 2026-07-23