The Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) In Action: The Descriptive Assessment
In November 2024, after years of research and community consultation, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) released three Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) standards, covering Sample Preparation and Cupping Mechanics, the Descriptive Assessment, and the Affective Assessment. These standards are the foundation of the new system used to complete the value assessment coffee: they are essentially the official guidebooks of the CVA!
In this first instalment of a three-part series, LAUREL CARMICHAEL shares stories from industry leaders about how the CVA's Descriptive Assessment has become an insightful and powerful tool for their work.
While important, these standards only tell part of the CVA’s story: they’re the base for further discussion, experimentation, and practical learning. Like the 2004 Cupping Form and Protocol that preceded it, the CVA will continue to be shaped by its users as they apply and adapt the system in their diverse professional environments. As more of our industry begins to adopt the CVA, we’ve heard stories from early users about how the CVA became an effective and intuitive tool for their work—especially after seeing it applied by others in different contexts.
This article is the first of a three-part series sharing interesting and practicable stories about how industry leaders are integrating the CVA into their work environments. We’ll begin with a look at the Descriptive Assessment, move to the Affective Assessment in the second instalment, and close with a set of exercises to help familiarize yourself with the CVA’s core concepts.
Reconnecting Cuppers with the Importance of Sensory Attributes
Whether they’re responsible for assessing a large volume of coffees at a big trader or a small selection at a farm or roastery level, many of the cuppers I’ve spoken to repeatedly confirm that descriptions about a coffee’s taste, texture, and appearance guide their decision-making. The Descriptive Form’s CATA (check-all-that-apply) boxes structure the process of describing coffee in a way that encourages consistency, clarity, and good communication. Tasters are encouraged to check relevant descriptors about the fragrance/aroma, flavor/aftertaste, and mouthfeel of a coffee. They’re also asked to rank the overall intensity of the above categories, as well as of the coffee’s sweetness and acidity. Choosing from a pre-determined list of descriptors prompts tasters to record an accurate snapshot of the coffee, reducing the temptation to elicit only obscure descriptors, or to leave the category blank.
Eduardo Ambrocio—the co-founder of the Guatemalan export company Prisma Coffee Origins, and a long-time Cup of Excellence judge—notes that the CVA is “reconnecting cuppers” with what he considers the most important information about a coffee: its sensory characteristics. Active in the industry since 1993, Eduardo has witnessed several different waves of measuring quality in coffee, including as one of the first users of the 2004 SCA and Cup of Excellence forms. In Prisma’s early years, they’d try to buy and sell Guatemalan coffees based on scores but soon realised that numbers alone weren’t an accurate or useful way to communicate coffees. Prisma’s customers were far more interested in a coffee’s sensory profile than a single score. “As we came to understand our customers more,” Eduardo says, “we redesigned the way we selected and marketed coffees, focusing on characteristics instead. Using the CVA Descriptive Form has filled that gap in our daily task of communicating coffees.”
Roukiat Delrue, an expert coffee consultant based in Guatemala with an extensive experience in developing and teaching coffee evaluation in a wide variety of contexts, notes that the most frequent use of the CVA that she’s encountered is businesses using the Descriptive Form to develop a more structured approach to sensory analysis. Roukiat—who was instrumental in the CVA development and rollout—observed that the Descriptive Assessment’s CATA boxes encourage people to move away from esoteric descriptors like “the raspberries that grew in my grandmother’s garden,” and instead describe coffee according to relatable categories, such as “fruity,” and “berry.” Once the CATA boxes are ticked and the essential attributes are captured, she notes, people can be as specific or evocative as they like.
As romantic as coffee tasting as seen from the outside, professionals know that it’s often done under time-constraints and a good workflow is key. In cupping labs, at mills, within a cooperative, or at a roastery, being able to tick boxes is a huge advantage—it’s dismaying to revisit a cupping record to find it lacking essential information because didn’t have time to figure out that elusive descriptor on the tip of your tongue. What’s more, because the CVA system is adaptable, tasters who need to cup quickly can chose to complete a descriptive assessment. Combining a descriptive assessment with an extrinsic or affective assessment yields even more valuable data, but a descriptive assessment alone will capture plenty of sensory information.
An Effective Tool for Sales Communication
During the development of the Descriptive Assessment we heard from countless cuppers that simple descriptive words are the most valuable way to record a coffee’s attributes.
Accurate descriptive records are a great way for coffee buyers to build a strong offer list, celebrating both coffees’ sensory attributes and personal relationships (you can read more about this in the Extrinsic Assessment). Alex Pond—who founded Elio Coffee in Portland and has previously worked for Heart Coffee Roasters and Cup of Excellence—notes that he’s excited to use the descriptive form as part of the green-buying strategy of his planned new roastery. “If I use the descriptive form with partners, we can work together to find coffees to put on a menu,” Alex says. Using the Descriptive Assessment can be way to source coffees in conversation with long-term partners: discussing flavor profiles and availability, rather than reducing the complexity of coffee (and the labor and skill behind it) to a single score. For Alex, a descriptive assessment is more important to his buying than an affective assessment: “I don’t need to score your coffee—I already value your work. I trust you as a partner, so let’s work together to find coffees that fit these descriptions.” More detailed descriptions about coffee’s sensory character in the cupping archive allows producers or processors to solicit more specific feedback, such as “Did you find this lot more fruity than last year?” or “Did you rate the sweetness higher after I implemented a certain fermentation technique?”
Camila Khalife—a coffee quality specialist and founder of Girlsplaining Coffee and Botánica—notes that when she was buying parchment coffee in Ecuador to make blends, she (like many importers and exporters) used a custom assessment to describe coffees’ intrinsic attributes. Camila found that the CVA’s Descriptive Assessment offers a new way to capture information she’d already identified as important to her work in her own custom assessment. She also notes that the Descriptive Form could be a convenient tool for her customers (seeking blends or single-lot coffees) to clearly articulate what they’re looking for. She’s interested in sending descriptive forms to new partners. “I’d give them a form and ask them to fill it out. This provides a clear impression of what they want, allowing me to better match them with coffees that suit their needs.” Ultimately, Camila suggests, asking a customer to fill out a descriptive form helps them to reflect on their needs and the flexibility of their brief in a structured way, increasing awareness of what is most important and reducing the potential for miscommunication.
Understanding Coffee, Building Skills
The Descriptive Form can also have impacts further downstream. Mars Ng, who placed second in the German Roasting Championships in 2024 and coached Andrea Trevisan to third place in the 2024 World Roasting Championships, noted how the Descriptive Form was useful for rapidly assessing sample roasts during the competition. The form helped her to answer questions such as, “Did this roast adjustment help to make the mouthfeel ‘silky’ instead of ‘rough and chalky’?” Since 2024, roasting competitors must complete a descriptive assessment as part of their roast plan, a skill test that has clear parallels with planning and profiling in a roastery environment. Integrating the CVA into a roastery is made easier by the fact that it’s available on several apps that are part of many roasteries’ existing toolkits, including Catador, Tastify, and Cropster.
Camila and Roukiat—both experienced World Coffee Championship judges—noted that the integration of elements of the Descriptive Assessment into competitions has made the judging process fairer and more transparent. The CATA boxes, they note, save a lot of time during debriefing and help to reduce conflict over the accuracy of the sensory descriptors given by a competitor. “It was impossible to verify whether a coffee truly tastes like ‘a blood orange from Valencia harvested in moonlight,’ but I can certainly confirm whether a coffee tastes like citrus fruit.” The CATA boxes help make describing coffee in competitions less intimidating to some participants, Camila says: “It helps to remove some of the ego from competitions, because—as a judge or a competitor—it doesn’t matter whether you’re familiar with 30 different types of oranges or not.”
The descriptive form framework for coffee professionals also provides opportunities to communicate in a common language in a visual way. In the Dominican Republic, Álvaro Peláez and his daughters Melissa-Kaldi and Karina-Kari use a customised version of the CVA descriptive form to review coffees and share them on Instagram. They do this exercise for fun, as well as to train themselves to accurately describe coffee—a skill that both consumer research and testimony from coffee traders proves is deeply valuable. They find the Descriptive Form compelling, because using CATA boxes and intensity scales highlights where they align and diverge as coffee tasters, and it gives them a snapshot of each coffee that’s easy to share visually.
Beyond the Cupping Table
The core principles of descriptive assessment lend themselves to uses beyond the cupping table. For example, the terms that tasters check while completing a descriptive assessment can also be used in coffee labelling on retail bags or café menus. Research has shown that coffee consumers value concrete source words, such as “citrus,” “nutty,” or “spicy.” As Bente Klein Hazebroek and Ilja Croimans wrote for 25, words help customers to create a mental image of a coffee’s flavor, their desire to taste and willingness to pay—and not by a trivial amount.
Outside of competitions, there’s an opportunity to use descriptive assessments in roasted coffee evaluation. Every roastery has received well-intentioned, but hard to interpret feedback from baristas about the performance of different roast profiles. While the CVA was designed for green coffee assessment, cafés could complete a descriptive form as part of their dial-in procedure, providing clear, structured, and trackable feedback each time they dial in a new roast batch or coffee.
And that’s just a few ideas! We’re looking forward to hearing more from you in the future about how you adopt and integrate descriptive assessment into your work. In the meantime, we’re turning our attention in our next instalment of this series to the CVA’s Affective Assessment, sharing stories from those who have welcomed the space for subjectivity and personal preferences in cupping.
LAUREL CARMICHAEL (they/them) is the Editor of 25. This was the first instalment of a three-part series on the Coffee Value Assessment. 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.