SCA scores, explained: the 98-point record and Spain's torrefacto habit

The short answer: an SCA score is a professional quality grade for coffee on a 100-point scale, defined by the Specialty Coffee Association. Anything scoring 80 or above qualifies as specialty coffee. The high 80s are excellent, the 90s are rare, and the all-time competition record is 98 — a Panamanian Geisha that sold at auction in 2025 for $30,204 per kilogram is the bar far the bar to beat. Most everyday coffee in Spain, meanwhile, has never been near a cupping table — and much of it is torrefacto: roasted with sugar until the bean has a burnt sugar glaze. Lets dive in to the cup a bit , from why the score exists to why your supermarket shelf looks the way it does, and why it is super important.

Why does the SCA exist at all?

For most of its modern history, coffee has been traded as a commodity — an undifferentiated raw material, priced by the sack, where the farmer who picked only ripe cherries and dried them with obsessive care earned the same as the farmer who didn't. If quality can't be measured, quality can't be paid for.

The pushback started when coffee buyer Erna Knutsen coined the term “specialty coffee” in 1974 to describe beans with distinctive character from particular microclimates. In 1982, American roasters founded the Specialty Coffee Association of America to define and defend that idea, and in 2017 it merged with its European counterpart to become today's SCA. Their most important invention wasn't a trophy or a trade show — it was a common language: a standardized way to taste a coffee and put a number on it. The score exists so that the producer who does everything right can prove it, and charge accordingly. Every extra point is meant to end up, at least in part, in the farmer's pocket. Thats the idea anyway, and as a buyer of green coffee, here at Tosco Fino it is true. Every point, increases the costs we pay to the importer, and to the farmer.

How does a coffee earn its score?

Scoring happens in a ritual called cupping: the coffee is roasted to a standard profile, ground and brewed to standard proportions, and tasted blind — usually by graders certified through the Coffee Quality Institute (“Q graders”), trained and calibrated so that a cup scored in Nairobi means the same as one scored in Barcelona.

The classic form grades ten attributes: fragrance and aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, clean cup, uniformity, and overall impression — with points subtracted for defects. Since 2023 the SCA has been rolling out a modernized system (the Coffee Value Assessment), but the 100-point language remains the industry's shorthand, and it breaks down roughly like this:

• Below 80: commodity grade. Not specialty; this is most of the world's coffee.
• 80–84: very good — clean, solid, drinkable specialty.
• 85–89: excellent — distinctive character, real complexity, no hiding places. This is where Tosco Fino buys.
• 90+: outstanding and genuinely rare — competition territory. Someday...

What does the difference actually taste like? An 84 is a coffee with no faults. An 87 is a coffee with a personality — the strawberry that jumps out of our Kenya, the cinnamon in the Costa Rica — flavors that are only possible when everything went right, from picking to processing to storage. Every coffee we sell scores 85 or higher, and we print the exact score on the bag next to the producer's name, the varietals, the process, and the altitude — because a score without traceability is just a number.

What's the highest score ever — and what did it sell for?

In 2025 the ceiling moved. At the Best of Panama — the competition that has crowned the world's most celebrated lots for decades — Hacienda La Esmeralda entered a washed Geisha that judges scored 98 out of 100, the highest mark in the competition's history.

Then it went to auction. After 549 bids, the 20-kilogram lot sold for $30,204 per kilogram — about $13,705 per pound, more than $600,000 for a single lot — to Julith Coffee, a café in Dubai that had opened its doors that same month. At the same auction, Esmeralda's 97-point natural Geisha went for $23,608 per kilogram. For scale: the previous world record, set just one year earlier, was $10,013 per kilogram.

Do the math on a single espresso and it gets insane and absurd: an 18-gram dose of that record lot is over $500 of raw coffee — before anyone roasts it, ships it, or pulls the shot.

Should you care? Honestly: these auction lots are trophies — part scarcity, part marketing, part philanthropy — and nobody needs a $500 espresso. But the record tells you something real about the scale itself: the distance between a 78 and a 98 is the distance between an anonymous sack and a coffee the whole industry bids on by name. The score is the proof that coffee, like wine, rewards the people who treat it as agriculture instead of extraction.

So what is “normal” coffee in Spain? Torrefacto, explained

Walk into almost any Spanish supermarket and look at the coffee shelf: mezcla 70/30, mezcla 50/50. That second number is torrefacto — beans roasted with sugar. Spanish regulation allows up to 15% sugar by weight, added during the roast, where it caramelizes and burns into a glossy black shell around the bean.

The technique is genuinely Spanish history in a cup. A businessman from Badajoz, José Gómez Tejedor of Café La Estrella, patented it back in 1901 after seeing beans preserved in sugar — the shell kept coffee “fresh” for months in an era without vacuum packing. But torrefacto truly conquered Spain during and after the Civil War, when coffee was scarce and precious: the sugar added weight, stretched supply, and — crucially — masked the taste of the cheapest robusta beans. It solved a real problem. A 1940s problem.

That heavy, ashy bitterness many of us grew up calling “strong coffee”? A lot of it is burnt sugar, not coffee. And that's the point of the contrast: a torrefacto bean cannot be scored, because the glaze makes the bean's own quality unreadable — which was, originally, exactly its job. Torrefacto exists to hide what's in the bag. An SCA score exists to prove it.

We say this with affection — the cortado is still a labor of love, and a part of life, at every local bar is culture, and nobody's abuelo or preferences are judged. For us at Tosco Fino, the bean itself is the point, not the sugar that caramelizes in our roaster.  It's a different drink, one that helps us celebrate the individual farmers, women, and producers that strive to put their name on the map, on the bag and onto the tip of your tongue.

How to use the score on our bags

Our lineup runs from SCA 85 to 88 — the “excellent” band — and each bag tells you who grew it, which varietals, how it was processed, and at what altitude. Two practical notes: first, the score measures the coffee's quality, not your preference — an 85 what you love beats an 88 you don't, and process matters as much as points (a natural and a washed at the same score are wildly different cups). Second, the score was earned at a cupping table; extracting it at home is your half of the deal. Pick the grind for your brewer, grind fresh if possible, follow ours or your favorite recipe, and the number on the bag starts making sense in the cup.

A note from Taylor Holyszko- Owner/Roaster Tosco Fino. 'There are a million variables to try and that is, at least for me, as the owner and roaster at Tosco Fino, something I love as much as the cup itself. Coffee is  just as much about an excellent cup, as it is about people, culture, history and change. I am forever grateful to the farmers, graders, and professionals in the coffee world that I get the privilege to work with to help expand access to truly wonderful coffee, produced with care, compassion and fairness to the land and people'

So start with the current lineup, or if you're wondering about processes, grinds, or what “SCA 85+” means for your morning, the FAQ covers it.

Sources: Sprudge on the 2025 Best of Panama record; STiR Coffee & Tea on the $10,013/kg 2024 record; Specialty Coffee Association; Torrefacto history and regulation.