What is a bean score?

82 points. 85 points. 87.5.

People use a coffee's score as shorthand for quality, and you'll hear it called a bean score, a coffee score, a cupping score or an SCA score, usually as if they're all the same thing.

They're not quite. And BeanScore, the app, means something different again.

So here's the useful version. In specialty coffee, a bean score normally means a quality score given to a coffee by trained tasters, out of 100. On BeanScore it means something closer to home: what real drinkers thought of a coffee, and how well that coffee fits your taste. Both are worth understanding, because they answer different questions.

Where the numbers come from

Bean score isn't really the industry's term. Professionals talk about a coffee score or a cupping score.

Coffees have long been assessed through cupping, where trained tasters work through a sample and score it out of 100 on things like flavour, acidity, body, aftertaste and balance. Over the years 80 became the number that mattered. Above 80 and a coffee got called specialty, with higher scores taken to mean something more distinctive or more complex.

That language is still everywhere. Roasters, importers and competitions all still talk about 84, 86 or 90 point lots, and it's a genuinely useful shared vocabulary for people buying and selling green coffee.

But the industry itself has moved on from treating one number as the whole story.

Even the SCA stopped trusting a single score

The Specialty Coffee Association now uses something called the Coffee Value Assessment. Rather than relying on one score, it looks at a coffee four ways: the physical assessment, which covers things like defects, moisture and size; the descriptive assessment, which records aroma, flavour, texture and aftertaste in standardised language; the affective assessment, which is the evaluator's impression of quality; and the extrinsic assessment, which covers everything around the cup, such as traceability, certifications and how the coffee was processed.

That third one is the interesting one, because an affective assessment is explicitly tied to preference. The industry has formally made room for the idea that an opinion is part of the picture.

The SCA's definition of specialty coffee has shifted the same way. It now describes specialty coffee as "a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes" which, "because of these attributes, has significant extra value in the marketplace". Notably, the old above-80-points line is cited in that work as an example of a definition too narrow to be much use.

I think that's an important shift. A single number is useful. It just can't carry everything.

An 87 point coffee still might not be your coffee

Picture two coffees. One is floral, bright and properly acidic. The other is chocolatey, full bodied and much softer.

Both can be excellent. A professional assessment might tell you one is technically more refined than the other. What it can't tell you is which one you'd rather drink on a Tuesday morning.

That's the thing I kept circling back to while building BeanScore. There's a difference between how good is this coffee, and how good is this coffee for me. They get treated as one question and they really aren't.

So what is a BeanScore?

That's where the name comes from.

A BeanScore isn't trying to replace cupping. It's for the person actually drinking the coffee. Coffees on BeanScore carry community ratings out of five from real drinkers, so you get a plain view of how people have found a coffee rather than how it graded.

But the score is only one layer. When you rate coffees, you're also building your Taste DNA, the profile BeanScore builds from the coffees you actually enjoy, including acidity, body, sweetness, the flavour notes that keep coming up and how you brew. After five ratings it starts using that to personalise what you're shown.

So a BeanScore is really two things at once. What the community made of this coffee, and how relevant it is to you.

I don't want to build another leaderboard

This is also why I don't think a consumer rating should try to imitate professional cupping. They're solving different problems.

A professional coffee score helps buyers, roasters and producers talk to each other about quality and value. A BeanScore helps somebody decide whether to spend twelve quid on a bag. Related, but not interchangeable.

If a coffee scores 90 and you can't stand floral, tea-like coffees, the 90 doesn't make you enjoy it. And your favourite everyday coffee doesn't need a competition score to justify the fact that you keep buying it.

Which is the bit I'm wary of. Keep the two ideas separate and two people can look at the same coffee and take different, useful things from it. One sees 4.6 out of 5 and thinks that'll do nicely. The other sees the same 4.6 and clocks that it's nothing like what they usually enjoy. Both have learned something. Collapse it all into one ranking and everybody just ends up chasing the same number.

A score is more useful when you know whose it is

There's a related problem with ratings online generally. Whose score are you looking at?

Someone brewing V60 every morning can have a completely different experience of the same bag to someone pulling it through a machine for flat whites. Equipment matters, method matters, how long you've been at it matters, and preference matters most of all.

So BeanScore shows ratings alongside context about the coffee and the people doing the rating. I went into that more in Is BeanScore the Vivino for coffee?.

And the coffee has to still exist

One more thing a bean score needs if it's going to help you discover anything. The coffee has to be buyable.

Specialty coffee is seasonal. Lots sell out, harvests change, roasters rotate their ranges constantly. So the BeanScore discovery catalogue is built around live coffees rather than becoming an archive of everything that ever existed. As I put it in Coffee discovery has a stale data problem:

A catalogue containing 10,000 coffees isn't very useful if the coffee you want to try disappeared two years ago.

A brilliant score on a coffee nobody can buy isn't much help when you're deciding what to order next.

So, what is a bean score?

If you mean it in the general sense, it's a numerical assessment of coffee quality, more properly called a coffee score or a cupping score, and historically that's meant the 100 point scale. These days the industry is increasingly comfortable saying that coffee value is more complicated than one number.

And if you mean BeanScore, it's two numbers doing two jobs. The community score tells you what people thought of a coffee. Your Taste DNA tells you whether it's likely to be right for you.

One is opinion. The other is relevance. Put them together and the score stops being the end of the conversation and starts being the beginning of one.