The Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) In Action: The Affective Assessment
One of the key differences between the recently adopted Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) standards and the SCA’s 2004 Cupping System is a separation between describing and affectively scoring a coffee.
In this second instalment of a three-part series, LAUREL CARMICHAEL shares stories from industry leaders about the ways the CVA’s Affective Assessment has created space for our industry’s increasingly diverse preferences.
The Descriptive Assessment, as discussed in part one of this series, asks assessors to describe coffee clearly, without presupposing that potential buyers will prefer the same coffees as they do. The Affective Assessment asks cuppers to record their impression of quality by scoring categories like aroma/fragrance, flavor/aftertaste, acidity, sweetness, and mouthfeel on a 9-point affective scale. The 9-point hedonic scale is widely used in sensory science because—fun fact—it uniquely includes a neutral midpoint, unlike a 5- or 10-point scale. The CVA encourages cuppers to these assessments separately, reflecting sensory science best practice: while it’s possible to describe things like flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel objectively (when tied to a series of mutually agreed references), our preferences will always be subjective.
For example, a group of cuppers might all describe a coffee as floral but have totally different impressions of how this floral attribute relates to quality. Some might find it refreshing, others might find it soapy and overpowering. An affective assessment encourages us to be honest and transparent about how our subjective taste impacts our perception of quality, removing the need for producers and suppliers to interpret what’s going on behind a score (such as how much value we assign to floral flavors). We’re recording how the coffee has affected us, as tasters who—no matter how qualified—have deeply personalized and culturally-informed palates.
Describing and scoring separately also has workflow advantages. Many CVA users have gravitated more towards one of the system’s assessments (physical, descriptive, affective, and extrinsic) than the others, or found different assessments useful in different contexts. With this new system, users can complete all of the four assessments, or they can focus on the form that best fits the task at hand. Camila Khalife, a coffee quality specialist and founder of Girlsplaining Coffee and Botánica, told me that, when she cups with a particular client (a producer and exporter from Ecuador), he fills out the Affective Assessment while she completes the Descriptive Assessment. They divide the roles because “he likes the way that I perceive and describe flavors, and he likes to score coffee because he finds his affective assessment useful when communicating with customers.” Completing the different assessments individually but simultaneously saves them time, optimizes their respective skill sets, and leads to a very interesting conversation when they share their results at the end!
Acknowledging—Not Obscuring—Preference
Every CVA user I spoke to during my interviews for these features enjoyed the freedom and fun that comes with expressing preference during cupping. Roukiat Delrue, an expert coffee consultant who was instrumental in the development and rollout of the CVA, noted that many cuppers initially find it difficult to accept that subjective cupping has a role in coffee assessment, especially when so many of us have been trained that “calibration” is the best way to measure our success as cuppers. However, as CVA users become more familiar with the system, Roukiat says, they often find the process of affective assessment reassuring. There’s less pressure to conform and it’s easy to explain what they value. Whether we like it or not, it’s impossible to remove preference from discussions about quality and value, and the Affective Assessment reduces some of the mental gymnastics that many tasters have acknowledged they perform when trying to score coffee quality objectively.
Alex Pond is one of many CVA trainers who told me that using the Affective Assessment allows cuppers to express their genuine preferences, without fear of being perceived as “uncalibrated,” and therefore a bad cupper. As a part of his own CVA learning journey, Alex conducted exercises with 24 cuppers in Taiwan and Thailand who blind cupped the five-highest scoring coffees from the 2024 Taiwan Cup of Excellence, using both the CVA and Cup of Excellence forms. The group of experienced cuppers found it freeing to express their genuine appreciation for the coffees on the table, without the pressure of conforming to a scoring norm and were surprised and reassured by how closely their affective scores correlated with their Cup of Excellence Form scores. Alex reported that the score calculator and table (which inputs the 9-point scores from categories such as acidity and mouthfeel into a formula, resulting in a score from 0-100) removed the possibility of backwards scoring—when a cupper has a score in mind from the start and retrospectively tries to justify it.
Discovering and Communicating Value
“One of the beautiful parts of the Affective Assessment is that the more we embrace subjectivity, the more we can make sure that our subjective preference is informed,” Camila explained to me. “It encourages us to think about what we like and develop a set of criteria that reflects what our market wants.” Assessing coffee affectively is fun, but it’s also a way identify a coffee’s diverse and valuable attributes. Sharing the right attributes with the right markets is one way that intermediaries at different points throughout coffee’s supply system can maximise coffee’s value. Skilled cuppers can learn to assess coffee intersubjectively: this means that they incorporate and align to the known preferences of a market or customer in their affective analysis. For example, “I’m giving this coffee a high affective score, because I know my client is looking for a chocolatey coffee with some bitterness to suit their customer base, and this fits their needs.”
One of the surprisingly impactful aspects of the CVA, Rouki reflected, is that cuppers are asked to record the “purpose” of the cupping at the top of each form. This is a reminder and reassurance that it’s okay—and in fact highly competent—to cup with different aims at different times or while wearing different hats.
Celebrating the Diversity of Preferences
When learning to cup with the 2004 system, most of us were taught that the best way to measure our success was how our scores aligned with other cuppers, even if those cuppers were not partners in our supply chain. One of the first things I was told at a cupping table was, that a) I should aim for my scores to be calibrated with other peoples’, and b) those scores would probably be somewhere in the 84-89 point range. That led to me, like many other people, consciously and unconsciously aiming for scores within this narrow band, often worrying that I’d "cupped badly” if a score deviated from the norm. When looking back it my cupping records, it was difficult to identify the coffees that I loved from coffees that I liked, because there was often an arbitrarily small gap between their scores. We cup, in part, to identify “specialness” in coffees—but this is difficult when every coffee looks similar on a scoresheet. One of the key aims of the CVA Affective Assessment was to create a system that would offer a clear way to see differences between samples, so it’s been particularly gratifying to hear that several CVA users have found this to be true.
The CVA, Rouki argues, is a great tool for finding value in an era when—due partly to the innovations of the “processing revolution”—coffee has vast and often polarising sensory diversity. “With the affective system, it’s very possible for highly competent cuppers to give the same coffee a score of 73 or 97, especially if they’re cupping for different markets.” Rather than engage in discussions about whether certain sensory profiles are “objectively good or bad,” affective scoring allows us recognize that there’s a market for virtually every coffee: we just need to find it. The acknowledgement of preference diversity helps us to be honest about the things that have always influenced a buyer’s decision-making, whether consciously or not. Roukiat notes that, if a cupper (and their market) loves coffees with a lot of sour and fermented flavors, they now “have permission” to reflect this in their affective scores, instead of worrying about whether these flavors are “objectively good.” Increased transparency about preferences helps coffee sellers, including producers, to identify where their coffees are most valued and direct their resources accordingly.
Beyond the Cupping Table
Just like the Descriptive Assessment, the core principles of the Affective Assessment lend themselves to uses beyond the cupping table. Affective assessment offers a quick and easy way to understand what someone likes, so why not ask a few of your regular customers to score different elements of a coffee you serve or sell them on the 9-point scale? Within a few examples, you’ll likely have a very clear picture of what kind of coffees you should recommend them in future. The ability to conduct an affective assessment “intersubjectively” also offers roasteries and cafés a way to teach new staff their “house style.” For example, trainers could ask baristas to give a 9-point score to coffee’s they’re dialing-in, identifying thresholds for when something is exemplary, is merely “servable,” or should be remade.
We know that adopting a new approach to evaluating coffee can feel intimidating, especially because it ultimately influences important business decisions, careers, and livelihoods. When thinking about introducing the CVA into your workflow, it’s important to remember that you can adopt and adapt aspects of the system according to your own needs. We think that the completing a Physical, Descriptive, Affective, and Extrinsic Assessment is the best way to comprehensively capture coffee’s value, but we also know that coffee evaluation occurs in real, professional environments with different needs, resources, and time constraints. To help you decide when and where the CVA fits you—and your partners’—needs and make the transition, the third and final instalment of this series will offer practical tips on how to familiarize yourself with key workflow and sensory elements of the new system.
LAUREL CARMICHAEL (they/them) is the Editor of 25.
This was the second instalment of a three-part series on the Coffee Value Assessment. Read the first feature on the CVA Descriptive 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.