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Coffee Value Assessment

Properties3
descriptionThe SCA's current system for evaluating coffee — four separate assessments replacing the single 100-point cupping score.
tagsconcept, tasting, scoring
aliasesCVA, SCA CVA, Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), CVA form, methods-and-concepts/coffee-value-assessment, concepts/coffee-value-assessment

10 min read

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”.1

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.2

The four assessments

The SCA’s CVA page names four components, each answering a different question:

ComponentWhat it looks atThe question it answers
PhysicalColour, defects, moisture content, bean size — the green coffee itself, before anyone tastes itWhat 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.3

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.4
  • It anchors the licence. The Q Grader course is now built around CVA — the SCA expects candidates to arrive already familiar with it.5
  • 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.

Filling it in: the digital tools

CVA is more forms than the old system was, and the SCA has since pointed people at software rather than paper. It announced that “the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) and its tools are now available to use in the digital space, on two platforms”:

  • TheBeanGeek, a free web tool founded by Peter Kulcsar, covering the affective, descriptive and combined forms, “completely free to use, with no account required to begin an assessment.”
  • Quantify CVA, an iOS and Android app from Dongjun Oh’s team, which adds several people cupping the same table at once with live syncing, generates official SCA CVA PDF forms, and runs in eight languages. The SCA says it launched after “a large-scale testing phase involving more than 18,000 evaluation records.”6

Worth noticing what these cover: the in-cup forms — affective, descriptive, and a combined sheet. The physical and extrinsic sides are not what the tooling grew up around, which is a fair signal of which parts of CVA the trade is actually filling in day to day.

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 2004.7 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. One thing does point the right way, though. The downloadable resource files on the SCA’s own CVA page carry dates in their filenames — “Sept2024” and “281024” (28 October 2024) — which puts the SCA’s own published CVA documents in the second half of 2024, consistent with a late-2024 adoption even though the page never says so in words.8 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.9 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 — "conduct them separately to avoid bias," and the transparency aims

A research summary published on note.com states that the four assessments are meant to be independent and should be carried out separately so that one does not bias another, and that CVA’s wider purpose is to raise industry transparency and support sustainable development by folding production process, social and economic background, and sustainability into evaluation.10 Neither claim could be confirmed at the source. The SCA’s own page says only that “coffee evaluators can conduct one or all of these assessments” — permission to pick and choose, which is not the same as an instruction to keep them apart to prevent bias. The transparency and sustainability framing is plausible and fits CVA’s extrinsic module, but it comes here from a single blog rather than an SCA document. An SCA news article said to argue the information-sharing case (“The Coffee Value Assessment: An Opportunity for Information Sharing”) returned 404 when fetched11 and does not appear in the SCA’s current news listing.12

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.13 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.

Footnotes

  1. SCA — Coffee Value Assessment ↩

  2. Espresso Academy (SCA Premier Training Campus) — An introduction to the new Coffee Value Assessment — returned 403 on fetch; cited via research report ↩

  3. Royal Coffee New York — How to use the SCA CVA form — secondary; cited via research report ↩

  4. SCA — Coffee Standards ↩

  5. SCA — Specialty Coffee Association ↩

  6. SCA — The Coffee Value Assessment is Now Available on Two New Digital Platforms: TheBeanGeek and Quantify CVA ↩

  7. Daily Coffee News — SCA officially adopts new cupping forms and standards — returned 403 on fetch; cited via research report ↩

  8. SCA — A System to Assess Coffee Value, June 2024 (PDF) — returned 404 on fetch ↩

  9. Ethiocoffee — SCA Coffee Value Assessment: Buyer’s Guide — secondary commercial source ↩

  10. Comprehensive Survey of CVA Coffee Evaluation (note.com) — blog; cited via research report ↩

  11. SCA — The Coffee Value Assessment: An Opportunity for Information Sharing — returned 404 on fetch ↩

  12. SCA — News index ↩

  13. Sweet Maria’s — The new coffee cupping form nobody asked for — opinion; cited via research report ↩

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