Specialty Coffee Association

Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)

The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) is the global trade body for specialty coffee. It was formed from the merger of the American (SCAA) and European (SCAE) associations, and it sets many of the standards, protocols, and education programs the industry runs on.¹

The merger took effect in January 2017.²

The SCA is the source of the widely cited framework where a coffee scoring 80+ points on a standardized cupping form is considered “specialty.” Its own current definition of the term drops the number entirely — see Specialty coffee.

That framework is now the older one. The SCA’s current system is the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), which replaces the single 100-point score with four separate assessments — physical, descriptive, affective and extrinsic — published as SCA standards 102 through 105.³ The “80+” line still describes how the trade talks, but it is not something CVA itself produces.⁴

Related

• Specialty Coffee Association of America — the American predecessor body, 1982–2017, and where most of these standards were first written
• Specialty coffee — the term itself, and the SCA’s current one-sentence definition of it
• Cupping · Coffee scoring · Coffee Value Assessment · Q Grader · Coffee Quality Institute
• World Coffee Events — the competition arm the SCA absorbed, which built the seven world championships
• Coffee trade shows — World of Coffee, the SCA’s own travelling trade fair, and the wider show circuit
• World Brewers Cup · World Barista Championship — two of those championships
• Barista — the profession the SCA trains and certifies, and the one governments name it as a training route for

Official links

• Official site — Specialty Coffee Association

Footnotes

1. Specialty Coffee Association ↩

2. Specialty Coffee Association — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the January 2017 merger date ↩

3. SCA — Coffee Standards ↩

4. SCA — Coffee Value Assessment ↩