Resources

Here are some resources that will help with your ongoing education as well as tools for your roasting, evaluating and tracking of your coffees.

Forms

Official SCA Cupping Form

This is the official industry evaluation form for assessing the 10 key attributes of a coffee's profile. Each category receives a ranking from 1-10 and when totaled, provides a relative ranking on the 100 point scale.

Boot Coffee Cupping Form

This form also evaluates and scores coffee on a 100 point scale according to the same criteria. It does not have a specific field for defects/taints, but offers suggestive terms in most categories to help the cupper look for specific tastes and features.

Lab Card

Flavor Wheel

The image below is a reproduction of a card we make available to customers. It's a useful tool for continuing to learn roasting skills and awareness. The Flavor Wheel is the official flavor chart developed by the Specialty Coffee Association and World Coffee Research. It visually illustrates the various flavors (and aromas) typically found in coffee, along with their relationship to one another.

Roast Color Guide

The roast color chart offers a simplified nomenclature for degrees of roast (darkness), avoiding the often used but often seemingly arbitrary terms like "full city,"etc. The numeric values are approximations of Agtron spectrometer numbers, the coffee industry's most relied upon scale to accurately measure roast degrees. Again, these colors are only approximations. For accuracy, Agtron color cards are available from Agtron, as are their laboratory spectrometers.

SCA Flavor Wheel

The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel has been a standard industry tool for more than 20 years. This device was developed through extensive collaboration and helped establish common coffee vocabulary and lexicon.

Books

There are many books on coffee and roasting. These are our favorites and all great resources for any coffee library.

Scott Rao's is an industry veteran and long time consultant to coffee roasters. This book is a professional-level how-to for roasting. He has other books we'd recommend if you're serious about espresso.

This book by James Hoffman is a fantastic, high-level book covering all aspects of coffee growing, processing, roasting and brewing. Well arranged and beautifully photographed, this book offers a great start for the ins and outs of all things coffee.

Kenneth Davids is another long-time coffee veteran who has been writing, consulting and influencing the coffee industry for decades. Here is an article in which Mr. Davids reflects on the 100 point system for evaluating coffees which he pioneered and first used through his consulting and publishing platform, Coffee Review.

James O'Donnell offers his views on coffee roasting at home in this handy guide. It's a great overview, very approachable and affordable