Specialty coffee is coffee that a trained taster has scored above 80 points out of 100 on the Specialty Coffee Association form, and behind that number stand four differences anyone can check one at a time: how the fruit was picked, how many defects were left in the lot, how much is known about the place it grew, and how it was roasted. On a supermarket bag those four pieces of information are almost never there, and the reason is the different job that coffee was built to do.
That was the easy part. The hard part is that the word itself is policed by nobody: no authority checks the label specialty on a bag, and anyone can print it. From the outside you are still holding two bags of brown beans, one costs three times the other, and until you have a measure in your hand that word is worth as much as any other line of print on the packaging.
We roast this coffee and we sell it, so you have every right to read us with a hand on your wallet. Which is exactly why the two answers that do us no favours are here as well: when supermarket coffee is the right choice, and why specialty does not mean you will like it.
What the 80 points actually measure
The threshold comes from the Specialty Coffee Association cupping form, where a panel scores the coffee on ten headings (fragrance and aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, clean cup, sweetness, overall impression) and caps the defects allowed in the sample. Above 80 the coffee enters the specialty band, and the scale keeps climbing from there: 80 to 84.99 reads as very good, 85 to 89.99 as excellent, above 90 as outstanding. Those numbers live in the documents of the people who buy and sell green coffee, rather than on the pack you pick off a shelf.
Who certifies the word specialty?
Nobody does, and it is worth knowing before you trust a printed word. That score is an assessment made on a sample, not a certification attached to a product, and no body checks the term when it appears on retail packaging. The Specialty Coffee Association widened its own definition in 2021, moving it away from a single threshold and onto the distinctive attributes that give a coffee its value, and then built an evaluation system, the Coffee Value Assessment, that sets the sensory description alongside the quality judgement. Translated for whoever is paying: the score is a good clue, and the real check sits in the data the roaster agrees to print next to the name of the coffee.
What changes along the chain, from the tree to the bag
The first difference happens on the plant, months before anybody thinks about roasting. On a specialty lot the picking is done by hand and by selection: pickers go over the same tree several times and take only the ripe cherries, because an unripe one and an overripe one carry two different defects into the cup and neither of them gets corrected later. On our Colombia La Primavera that repeated pass is the reason a family of producers in Santa Maria, up in the hills of Huila, can keep a parcel of Pink Bourbon inside a microlot instead of inside a container. Mechanical harvesting does the opposite job, and does it superbly for its own purpose: it takes everything at once, green and ripe together, at a yield and a cost per kilo no hand will ever come close to.
The second difference is defect sorting. One black bean, one badly fermented, one small stone left in the lot can dirty a whole jug, and on a specialty coffee the sorting carries on until the sample sits inside the limits of the form. Our Honduras carries the initials in its own name, SHG EP: the first part says it is grown at altitude under the Honduran classification, the second stands for European Preparation, a stricter sort with the defects taken out by hand.
The third difference is traceability, and here the comparison is stark. On our Yemen Khawlani we know the names of the two brothers who grow it, Ali and Faisal Marwan, the area (Khawlani, in the Sa'ada region), the altitude between 1,800 and 2,000 metres, the Odaini variety and the natural process. An industrial lot is born instead from many different parcels joined together, often from different countries, and that blending is how the taste of a brand is held still for years. Two opposite aims: one describes a precise place, the other erases the differences between one harvest and the next.
Why specialty is roasted light and bar coffee is roasted dark
A light or medium roast leaves on the surface what the bean brought with it from its own ground: the citric acidity of a Colombian, the flowers of an Ethiopian, the honey of a Costa Rican honey process. It is a demanding choice, because everything that does not work in that coffee stays uncovered and nothing hides it.
A dark roast does a different job, and does it well. Push the development and the notes of the origin sink while the flavours born inside the roaster take their place: dark chocolate, toast, that bitter base which Italy files under the word coffee. It lets an industrial roaster deliver the identical cup to two thousand bars for ten years running, changing the lots inside the blend without anybody noticing, and it survives a dirty machine or an extraction made badly. If you want the long version of how a whole country got used to that taste, we wrote it in why Italian espresso tastes burnt, with nobody put on trial.
The roast date against an eighteen month best before
Turn an industrial bag over and you almost always find a single date, the best before, often eighteen months or two years away. Turn a specialty bag over and you find the roast date, the day that coffee was born. The difference between the two is entirely practical: the best before tells you how long the product can be sold, the roast date tells you where in its aromatic life you are drinking it.
Our bags carry the roast date, and we print it because it is the one piece of data that lets you judge us. On the good window it is worth being precise instead of alarmist, and the real windows, together with the damage done by air, light, heat and damp, are in the guide to storing coffee: the way you keep the beans at home weighs as much as the date printed on the bag.
When supermarket coffee is the right choice
Here comes the answer that does us no favours, and we give it anyway because we watch it happen every week. A specialty coffee bought well and brewed badly is worse than an industrial coffee brewed well, and it costs five times as much. Supermarket ground coffee used within a few days, in a clean pot and with decent water, comfortably beats a 20 euro microlot that was ground a week ago, dosed by eye and drowned in boiling water.
So if there is no grinder in your kitchen and no appetite for weighing anything, the honest road starts from the method rather than from the bag. The grinder first, because it is the control that governs all the rest, and how to choose one is in how to choose a coffee grinder; then the way water passes through the coffee, which is the heart of the complete guide to extraction. With those two pieces in place even an ordinary coffee improves at once, and the day you open a specialty you actually taste what you paid for.
Specialty does not mean you will like it
The second uncomfortable point is about taste, and it costs more disappointment than the first. Above 80 points you find coffees that share nothing at all in the cup: a floral, citric Ethiopian and a Brazilian thick with chocolate and hazelnut can carry the same score and stay two distant drinks. If you love your coffee round, sweet and chocolatey and you end up holding a washed lot grown high up, full of flowers and live acidity, that lands as a 20 euro disappointment rather than a discovery, and the conclusion you draw will be that specialty is overrated.
Which is why, when somebody arrives at our counter without knowing where to start, we keep the rarest coffee we have out of their hands. Anyone coming from espresso at home and looking for something familiar starts almost always from Genoa, our house blend of hazelnut, caramel and cocoa, and from there decides whether to move towards the fruitier profiles like the Sidamo Finca Habesha. The score says how well a coffee is made, and the person drinking it says whether it was made for them.
Where to start, if you want to try
The sequence that works is short. One bag only, chosen on the profile you already like instead of the most exotic one. A grinder, hand powered is fine, and the coffee ground at the moment you brew it. A weighed dose for the first two weeks, just to have a reference to move from. And the same attention to the roast date you would give to bread.
If you want to understand where the money goes before you buy, the full account is in why specialty coffee costs what it costs. If you already have the bag in your hand and all that small print means nothing to you, how to read a specialty coffee label takes it field by field.
Questions and answers
What is specialty coffee?
It means a trained taster has scored that coffee above 80 points out of 100 on the Specialty Coffee Association form, with a cap on the defects allowed in the sample. In practice it comes from selective picking and strict sorting, and it carries with it the information about where it grew and who grew it.
Is specialty coffee better than supermarket coffee?
It is more traceable, fresher, and roasted to show the origin instead of ironing it out. Whether you enjoy it more depends on your taste and on how you brew it: made badly, and without a grinder, it disappoints more than a good industrial coffee made well.
Why does specialty coffee carry a roast date instead of only a best before?
Because it is the only date that tells you where in its aromatic life you are drinking that coffee. A best before eighteen months away tells you how long the product can be sold, and on an aroma that changes week by week that is of little use.
Do you need a grinder to drink specialty coffee?
Yes, and it is the first purchase to make, before the coffee itself. Ground coffee loses its aromatics quickly, so even a simple grinder changes the result more than any step up in the bag.
In the end the difference comes down to a single question: how much of what you are drinking can you verify. On a specialty coffee you can check the score, the name of the person who grew it, the altitude, the variety, the process and the day it was roasted; on a coffee built to stay always identical to itself, that information does nothing for the job it has to do. We roast in Albenga, on the Ligurian coast, in an open roastery in full view of the room, and we put all of it on the bag precisely so that you can hold us to it.
All our coffees, with origin, process and notes in plain sight: pick your first one there, starting from the profile you already know you love. They ship anywhere in the European Union.