ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the concepts of the quality and classification of green coffee, two concepts that when combined result in the concept of “grading.” The concepts of quality and grading for most agricultural products tend to be simple. As the importance of the specialty coffee industry increased exponentially, the limitations of the national or commodity grading systems for the new industry became clearer. The performance of descriptive cupping has been validated against more traditional descriptive analysis techniques. The farms corresponding to the sampling sites were visited prior to the 2016–2017 harvest, and the processors were instructed in three different protocols: natural, honey and washed. The attributes that were found to have a significant effect on the farm or the processing method were then subject to principal component analysis to explain the effect of farm and processing in a multivariate model. However, looking at non-significant attributes can also provide a good insight into the effect of processing methods.