SCA cupping protocol

SCA cupping protocol and the 100-point scale

The SCA cupping protocol is the detailed recipe that made coffee scores comparable: it fixes exactly how a sample is roasted, ground, brewed and tasted, and it pairs that recipe with a 100-point scoresheet. Two people on opposite sides of the world, following it, are meant to be tasting the same thing and marking it the same way. This is the machinery underneath the plain-English idea of cupping and the numbers explained in Coffee scoring.

It was written by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) — the American body that later merged into today’s Specialty Coffee Association — and its 100-point form is the one the whole trade means when it says a coffee “scored 89” or “cleared 80 for specialty.”

This is the older system

The SCA has since replaced this single-number form with the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), which records four separate assessments instead of one score. The protocol on this page is the legacy one — but it is still the form competition results on this wiki are quoted against, and the CVA’s tasting mechanics inherit directly from it. Read this to understand where a score like “91 points” comes from; read Coffee Value Assessment for what the SCA does today.

The recipe half — preparing the sample

The genius of the protocol is that it removes every variable it can before anyone tastes, so the only thing left to judge is the coffee.

Roast. Samples are roasted light to light-medium, in a window of 8 to 12 minutes, and the roast must happen 8 to 24 hours before cupping — long enough to rest and degas, not so long that it goes stale.¹² The exact roast colour is pinned to a number on the Agtron scale (see the callout below).

Grind. Coffee is ground immediately before brewing — no more than 15 minutes ahead — and if it must wait, the cups are covered and used within 30 minutes.² The moment the grounds are exposed, the taster smells them: this is the dry fragrance.

Dose and ratio. The heart of the protocol is one number: 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water — very close to a 1:18 ratio.²¹³ Scaled up, that is roughly 11 g per 200 ml or 13.75 g per 250 ml.³ Every cup on the table is measured to the same dose so that strength never becomes a variable.

Water. Clean, fresh, never distilled or softened, poured at 200 °F (93 °C), with a tolerance of a degree or two either way.¹³²

The recipe half — the tasting sequence

Once the water hits the grounds, the protocol becomes a choreography timed to the minute:

1. Steep — 4 minutes. Water is poured to the rim over the measured grounds and left undisturbed. A crust of floating grounds forms on top.¹³
2. Break the crust. At four minutes the taster leans in, stirs three times to push the crust down, and smells the burst of aroma released — the wet aroma. The dry fragrance and this wet aroma together make the “Fragrance/Aroma” score.³²
3. Skim. The foam and floating grounds are lifted off with a spoon (or two), taking care not to stir up the bed at the bottom.⁴
4. Taste as it cools. Tasting starts once the cup drops to around 170 °F (~77 °C) — often 10–15 minutes after pouring — and continues as it cools, because different flaws and virtues show up at different temperatures.¹⁴ Tasters slurp (a sharp aspiration that sprays coffee across the whole palate) and typically spit, to stay sharp over dozens of cups.³

The whole thing is done blind — the taster never knows which coffee is in which cup — which is what makes the resulting number worth anything.

The 100-point scoresheet

The score is built from ten attributes, each worth up to 10 points, marked in steps of 0.25.³ Ten tens is where the “100-point scale” comes from.

Attribute	What it captures
Fragrance/Aroma	The smell — dry grounds and wet aroma after the break
Flavor	The main taste impression across the palate
Aftertaste	How the taste lingers and fades
Acidity	Brightness or liveliness (a virtue here, not a flaw)
Body	Weight and texture in the mouth
Balance	How the pieces fit together
Uniformity	Whether all five cups of the same coffee taste the same
Clean Cup	Freedom from off-tastes
Sweetness	Perceived sweetness
Overall	The taster’s own holistic judgement

In practice the quality attributes are scored on a ladder that starts around 6.00 and climbs to 10.00 — a coffee scoring below 6 on an attribute has fallen out of specialty territory.⁵ The form also carries defect checkboxes: a taint or a fault detected in a cup subtracts points from the running total.³⁵ The final number is the sum of the ten attributes minus any defects.

Reading the number

• 80+ is the classic line for specialty coffee.³
• 87+ is roughly what a lot must clear to win Cup of Excellence.
• The 90s are rare and exceptional — the record Best of Panama and Cup of Excellence lots live here.

Those thresholds are explained in full, with the record scores and prices, in Coffee scoring.

To verify — the exact roast (Agtron) numbers

The research report, citing the 2005 SCAA protocol document, gives a precise roast target: ~58 on the whole bean and ~63 ground on the M-Basic (Gourmet) Agtron scale (±1 point), equivalent to 55–60 on the standard Agtron scale, or **SCAA roast tile 55.² These specifics come from a single primary document that could not be opened and read directly here; the independent secondary sources confirmed only the 8–12 minute roast window and the 8–24-hour timing, not the Agtron figures. Treat the roast duration as confirmed and the exact colour numbers as reported-from-the-source but not independently checked.

To verify — the cupping water's mineral spec

The same primary document is reported to specify the cupping water’s dissolved-mineral load: ideal 125–175 ppm total dissolved solids, no less than 100 and no more than 250 ppm.² This is the cupping water spec specifically; note it differs from the general brewing-water figures discussed under Total dissolved solids, which are themselves disputed. Single-source, unconfirmed at origin here.

To verify — the "85+ premium specialty" tier

One cupping guide summarising SCA practice adds a step above the specialty line, calling 85+ “premium specialty.”⁵ Neither the primary protocol nor the other sources consulted describe an official SCA category by that name — the two blogs read here mention only the 80+ line. Treat “premium specialty” as an informal, secondary label rather than an official SCA grade.

To verify — when the form was written

The report dates the protocol’s formalisation to the SCAA Cupping Committee, April 2005.² Two other datings circulate on this wiki: the legacy cupping form is elsewhere dated to 2004 (see Coffee scoring and Q Grader), and the metadata inside the 2005 PDF names the underlying file “June 2003-Revised Cupping Protocol.” All three are consistent with a form that took shape in the mid-2000s and was revised more than once; the single “correct” year depends on which milestone — draft, revision, or formal adoption — you count.

Why it mattered

A single, portable number is a remarkable piece of infrastructure: it lets a buyer in Tokyo wire money for a lot in Panama they have never tasted, trusting that “91 points” means the same thing to the jury as it does to them. Every price on this wiki — the Best of Panama auctions, Cup of Excellence, the record-breaking lots — rode on this protocol and its scoresheet doing their job. The Coffee Value Assessment’s whole argument is that the one number was carrying too much; but for two decades, it carried the trade.

Related

• Cupping — the plain-English version of the tasting method this protocol formalises
• Coffee scoring — what the resulting number means, with the record scores and prices
• Coffee Value Assessment — the SCA’s current four-part system that replaced this form
• Specialty coffee — the term the 80-point line draws
• Q Grader — the licensed tasters trained and re-tested on applying this protocol consistently
• Total dissolved solids — the water-mineral measurement the protocol also specifies
• Sample roasting — the small test roast this protocol’s roast rules govern, and where the Agtron target is independently corroborated
• Coffee freshness and degassing — why the 8–24 hour roast window here is deliberately far shorter than the rest a drinker gives a bag
• Specialty Coffee Association of America — the body that actually wrote this form, and the dating dispute over when
• Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute — the bodies behind the standard and the licence
• Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence — the competitions whose results are quoted against this scale

Official links

• Official site — SCA Coffee Standards (sensory evaluation protocols)

Footnotes

1. Royal Coffee — How To Set Up And Run A Coffee Cupping: A Step-by-Step Guide — fetched and confirmed ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Specialty Coffee Association of America — Cupping Protocols (2005 PDF) — primary document; fetched, but its text could not be extracted from the PDF here, so its exact figures are cited as reported ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Podium Coffee Club — The SCA Cupping Protocol, Step by Step — fetched and confirmed ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

4. Royal Coffee — Cupping Protocols and Procedures (PDF) — secondary; cited via research report ↩ ↩²

5. ngopi — Cupping Protocol SCA: 10 Attribute Scoresheet — secondary; cited via research report ↩ ↩² ↩³