What is a Q Grader?

In the coffee industry the Q Grader license is often compared to the sommelier exam in wine—this is a shorthand that can be useful to provide some vague ballpark approximation, but over the next 2 podcast episodes we will see how different these tests are.

When I started to get serious about working in the coffee industry I was looking for ways to deepen my knowledge and the Q Grader license seemed like a good place to start. If I wanted to use fermentation techniques to improve coffee quality I would need to learn what the industry considered to be high quality.

Because how can we agree on what is coffee quality, without speaking the same sensory language?
To move the conversation of quality forward, I needed to differentiate between preference (coffees people like) and quality (agreed upon criteria that are independent of preference).

I have definitely scored high quality coffees that were not in my preferred flavor profile—conversely just liking a coffee is not enough to qualify it as a good coffee. It needs to meet quality standards of acidity, structure, body, sweetness and balance. I believe it is important to be able to put our personal preferences in context when evaluating a coffee.

Join me on today's episode as I share my experience with the Q Grader license.

To take a sensory class from Alexandre Schmitt: https://www.wineandflavors.com/en/

Maybe we can revive the hashtag: #letcoffeebecoffee