The Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) In Action: Six Activities to Familiarize Yourself with the Assessments
The Specialty Coffee Association has officially adopted three Coffee Value Assessment components as its new cupping standards. Although the standards and forms are based on broad community feedback and are designed to be intuitive to use, they still represent a significant shift in the way we think about assessing coffees and coffee quality.
In the last instalment of a three-part series, JENN RUGOLO offers tips on how to familiarize yourself with the concepts and workflow of CVA, including suggestions about how to teach and implement the assessments in your workplace.
As a member of the team involved in the drafting of the Coffee Value Assessment standards, I’ve had several years to undertake own personal journey understanding how and why the SCA was updating the 2004 system. I didn’t truly appreciate how much time it took for me to fully adopt the change in approach until I was watching a panel of CVA Ambassadors explain their own experience. Luiz Roberto Saldanha turned to the audience, asking us to cross our arms and take note of which arm goes over top of the other. “Now,” he said, “try to do it with the other arm on top instead.” My brain struggled as I tried to swap from leading with my left arm to my right. It was an excellent illustration of his point: not only does it take time and effort to change hard-wired habits, it can also be hard and uncomfortable to update “rote” behaviors. However, with intentional practice, we can rewire a habit and make it just as quick and easy as “the old way.”
Over the past year, we’ve received an increasing number of insightful questions from enthusiastic businesses the world over about how to make the transition from the 2004 system to the Coffee Value Assessment. In response, we’ve begun compiling some basic exercises you can do to familiarize yourself with some of the core concepts before you even reach your cupping table.
Taste in Two Steps
As my colleague, Dr. Mario Fernández-Alduenda, is fond of explaining, the new cupping standards don’t change the “hardware”—the methodology—of cupping, just the “software.” Rather than changing the mechanics of sample preparation and tasting, the changes are about what cuppers are asked to evaluate, and in what order: first, they evaluate what they taste (making no value judgement), before evaluating their impression of its quality. It’s very easy to practice this split in evaluations, also known as “the discrete task approach,” with anything that you eat or drink. If you want to really challenge yourself, you could do it with your first cup of coffee every morning, but you could also turn it into a fun tasting exercise with friends or colleagues. Here are two versions of a snack-forward activity that focus on different assessment skills:
This first version is the simplest, and focuses on helping a group to get comfortable expressing their preference as an individual taster or evaluator: something I had been trained to avoid for many years! First, ask everyone to bring one or two favorite snacks that the others are unlikely to have tried before. Working through them one by one, the group should start by describing what they taste or experience: What are the dominant flavors, textures, and aromas? The most important thing when discussing each snack is that you don’t use any words that indicate whether something is good or bad. It’s possible your perceptions may differ slightly—that’s just human physiology—but the group will likely agree on the general description of the snack. Once you’ve exhausted that line of conversation, it’s time to turn your collective attention to the group’s subjective opinions: what did they like? Starting from the first snack the group described, each person should discuss what they liked (and didn’t like) about each snack. This is also a good time to practice using the 1-9 scale from the affective assessment, too: how would each person score the snack, based on their own personal impression of its quality?
A second version of this exercise, facilitated by CVA Ambassador and trainer Shaun Ong at Educator Summit, helps participants to practice using information about a client’s or market’s preferences to assess on their behalf. (This is know as intersubjective cupping, and is a key competency for cuppers!) As with the first version, you’re still working with a group who have brought their favorite (and ideally unfamiliar) snacks. However, before any tasting begins, members of the group should break into pairs to discuss their favorite (and least favorite) foods and why they like (or dislike) them. Next, the group collectively tastes and describes the snacks as they would in the exercise above: without any words that indicate whether they are good or bad. When the time comes to discuss likes and dislikes with the broader group, each pair should “swap perspectives”: for example, partner A should assess and score as they believe partner B would, making informed guesses based on what partner B said about their favorite and least favorite foods. While sharing with the broader group, the pairs can then supplement their discussion around whether or not their partner’s predictions were accurate and why.
Explore Your Perception of Sweetness
When asked what changes they would make to the 2004 cupping system in a large study conducted by the SCA in 2021, a majority of the 1,500 professional cuppers who responded said they would “add a sweetness intensity scale.” Sweetness has long been an incredibly important attribute in coffee, but the 2004 system didn’t include a thorough evaluation—just a box to tick, indicating whether sweetness was present.
The CVA Descriptive Assessment includes a comprehensive evaluation of sweetness as an aromatic and a basic taste. It also asks you to rate overall sweetness intensity on a 15-point intensity scale, commonly used in food sensory science to quantify the presence of an attribute [1]. To get used to thinking about sweetness in this way, there a few easy exercises you can do with a group (or even by yourself!) to familiarize yourself with describing both the intensity and experience of sweetness. Here are two, put together by my colleague Peter Giuliano:
First, to practice describing aromatics in terms of the experience of sweetness they offer, you’ll need to gather five aromatic category examples associated with sweetness in coffee. You can find these on the CVA’s olfactory category example list: brown sugar, vanilla/vanillin, fruity, berry, and citrus fruit. Prepare the examples as directed and label them 1-5. Smell and describe (or discuss, if you’re in a group) each reference. Make sure you challenge yourself to find ways of describing your perception of sweetness beyond naming the aroma or using aroma-specific words to describe its sweetness. In other words, rather than describing the sweetness as “citrusy” or “fruity,” how would you characterize the intensity, complexity, or duration of the sample’s sweetness?
Second, to practice evaluating the intensity of sweet tastants in coffee using the 15-point scale, you (or a friend) will need to prepare four solutions of varying among of sugar (sucrose) to 1 L of water:
Solution A = 10 g/L
Solution B = 0 g/L
Solution C = 20 g/L
Solution D = 5 g/L
Once you have all four samples prepared, place these in small cups and place in front of tasters in order (from A to D) to experience, discuss, and reorganize their order from least sweet to most sweet. Sample A is the reference standard for “sweet” in the Coffee Value Assessment and World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon [2]; it’s slightly sweet, and about twice the threshold of detection for most tasters. Based on our experience, most tasters will rate this about a “5” on the 0-15 point intensity scale. Next, move on to solution B (the “just water” sample)—which should be rate as a 0, since there’s no sugar—and then solution C, which most tasters will rate at about a “10” on the 0-15 point scale. (This makes sense: solution A was 10 g/L, and solution C is 20 g/L!) Finish with solution D (5 g/L), which is right at the threshold of perception for most tasters: those who can distinguish it from solution B are likely to score it somewhere around a “2.” The goal of this exercise is not to get the numerical values exactly right, although ideally, they are in the “correct” third of the intensity scale (low, medium, high). Instead, the most important outcome of this exercise is the ability to arrange the samples relative to one another. Once the discussion of each sample is finished, ask tasters to re-order their samples from least to most sweet [3].
A fun—and important!—fact about the previous exercise: although the combination of sucrose and water is a standard reference for sweetness in sensory descriptive analysis, coffee sweetness is not created by sucrose in coffee! (We’re not completely sure what molecules are responsible, but the Coffee Science Foundation has research under way. [4]) Regardless, adding sugar to water still works as an illustration of sweetness in a liquid when it comes to thinking about intensity.
Get Comfortable with Categories
As my colleague Laurel Carmichael highlighted in Issue 22 of 25, the “check-all-that-apply” (CATA) approach of the CVA Descriptive Assessment helps cuppers to record sensory data in both categorical (basic flavor categories and generalizable mouthfeel descriptors) and specific terms (freely-elicited descriptors) [5]. However, if your cupping notetaking—like mine did—veers into the expressive, it can feel challenging, like you’re being asked to “go back to basics.” This is why I particularly loved Laurel’s example of how the freely-elicited descriptor of “feijoa” works in CATA terms: “checking the ‘fruity’ and ‘floral’ boxes and ranking the acidity intensity as ‘medium’ will make sure that someone who’s never tasted feijoa understands the essence or character of the coffee.”
One way to practice this kind of descriptive approach is to spend time with the olfactory lexicon from the CVA Descriptive Assessment. These are frequently used terms, representing descriptors that are often found on cupping sheets, each with several sensory examples you can use to help define the term. These terms and sensory category examples can be found in the digital version of the CVA’s olfactory category example list. To start, it may be helpful to prepare several examples and use them as references while tasting.
Another way to practice categorizing descriptors is to have someone prepare different sets of examples for you, so that you don’t know what was used. Your challenge, then, is to correctly identify which of the categories in the center of the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel fits each example best. But if that isn’t hard enough, you can go one step further: ask the person preparing your exercise to mix different category examples together!
Making the Transition
Once you feel more confident with these exercises and feel ready to take the next step by integrating the assessments into your cupping practice, don’t forget that you don’t need to integrate every single element of every single assessment at once. Yes, all the elements of the Coffee Value Assessment come together to create a high-resolution picture of a coffee, but different assessments can be used in different situations. For example, if you need to do a rapid assessment of a table of coffees—maybe you’re QC’ing a house blend or trying to figure out a new roast profile for well-loved coffee—you might want to use this as an opportunity to try the CVA Affective Assessment. Conversely, if you’re cupping to finalize the webshop notes on your latest coffee before it launches to customers, the CVA’s Descriptive Assessment (and the Extrinsic Assessment, still in beta!) are likely a better fit. The mix-and-match nature of this new system to assess a coffee’s value means there’s plenty of opportunity to get to know each assessment before you figure out how (and when or where) you’d like to integrate it into your business.
Happy exploring!
JENN RUGOLO is the Innovation Officer at the SCA and a member of the expert group who published the newly-adopted standards. This was the third and final installment of a three-part series on the Coffee Value Assessment. Read the first feature on the CVA Descriptive Assessment here, or the second feature on the CVA Affective Assessment here. To learn more about how to transition to the SCA’s new standards for coffee evaluation, read the official standards here or gain practical, hands-on experience at a course near you.
References
[1] World Coffee Research, Sensory Lexicon. P9.
[2] World Coffee Research, Sensory Lexicon. P13.
[3] From left to right, they should be in this order: B, D, A, C.
[4] Dr. Nancy Cordoba, Dr. Devin Peterson, Peter Giuliano. “How Sweet Coffee Tastes! Towards an Understanding of Coffee Sweetness.” Issue 22, 25. https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-22/understanding-coffee-sweetness
[5] Laurel Carmichael. “The Coffee Value Assessment: An Opportunity for Information Sharing.” Issue 22, 25. https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-22/coffee-value-assessment-information-sharing