How we record a figure

This page describes the rules a figure has to satisfy before it appears anywhere on Best Coffee Bean Site. They exist because coffee data fails in specific, repeatable ways.

The rules

Ask which price

A coffee price means nothing until you know where in the chain it was taken, what unit it is in, and whether it is for cherry, parchment, green or roasted. Every price here says all three.

Ask which scoring form

An 88 is only better than an 87 if both were cupped on the same form, and three are in use right now. We give you the score and the form together, and never rank across them.

A variety name is a claim

Almost no coffee sold anywhere has been genetically tested, so the variety on the label is what somebody wrote down. Where a lot has been tested we say so — and testing regularly disagrees with the label.

Grades are not a league table

Supremo is not above Excelso and AA is not a quality score — most export grades sort by bean size, and they sit inside each other rather than above each other. We show the shape each standard really has.

Harvest moves every year

No country has one harvest. It runs by region, by altitude and by crop, and it shifts with the weather — which is why a bag’s freshness depends on where in the country it grew, not just the year.

A blank means nobody published it

When you see an empty field here, it means no source worth citing has published that figure — not that we skipped it. We never fill one in from a neighbouring region or a similar-sounding variety.

The five price bases

Five different transactions along the chain are all called “the price of coffee”, and on the same day they can differ by three orders of magnitude. Every price we record is stored with the basis it belongs to, and prices from different bases are never averaged, ranked or placed side by side without that label attached.

Farmgate / internal
What the producer is paid at the mill door
Often quoted in a local unit, for a local state of the coffee, not per pound of green. Colombia posts a daily internal price per 125 kg carga of dry parchment, which only converts to green through the board’s own published yield factor.
FOB
Loaded at the port of origin
Includes milling, dry milling, bagging and inland freight. The first figure most importers actually see.
C market + differential
The commodity benchmark, plus a premium
The C is a futures price for a deliverable grade, not for any particular coffee. The differential carries origin, quality and certification, and in specialty it is often larger than the C itself.
Competition auction
A few hundred pounds, bid up internationally
A non-representative tail. These lots are tiny, scored under a specific protocol, and bought partly for the name. Never put one beside a farmgate figure without saying so.
Roasted retail
What you pay for a bag
Roasted weight, not green. Roasting drives off most of a fifth of the mass, so a retail price per pound is not comparable to a green price per pound without that adjustment.

Unit and state, not just currency

A price is also a claim about a quantity of something in a particular condition. Colombia publishes a daily internal price per carga: 125 kilograms of dry parchment, which is not green coffee. Converting that to the 70 kilogram excelso export sack requires the board’s own published yield factor, which varies and is published alongside the price for exactly that reason. Kenya quotes per 50 kilogram bag. Retail prices are for roasted weight, which has lost most of a fifth of its mass to the roast.

Deriving one from another without the published factor does not produce an estimate. It produces a number that looks like a measurement and is not one.

Scores carry their instrument

Three scoring regimes are live at the same time, and they are not interchangeable.

SCA cupping form (2004): The 100-point form nearly every published score used for twenty years. Superseded, and still in wide private use.
SCA Coffee Value Assessment (2024): Adopted November 2024 across SCA-102/103/104, superseding the 2004 form. Its scores are not directly interchangeable with it.
Cup of Excellence form: Never the SCA form. A CoE score and an SCA score are different measurements that happen to share a scale.
Private or tailored form: A house variant of the 2004 form. Common, and rarely disclosed.

An 88 on one form and an 87 on another cannot be ranked. Where we hold a score we hold the protocol with it, and where the protocol is unknown we say the protocol is unknown rather than printing the number alone.

Declared is not verified

A variety name is an attribute somebody declared, usually nobody has tested it, and testing regularly disagrees with the label. Every variety record carries a verification state, and the default is declared only because that is the true state of almost all coffee sold anywhere. Where genetic testing has been done we record the result whether or not it agreed with the name.

Grades nest, they do not rank

Export standards contain preparations, screen sizes and marks, arranged in structures that are not ladders. We record the structure the standard actually has. Where a widely repeated retail claim describes a hierarchy the standard does not contain, we say so on the record rather than quietly using the correct version and leaving the reader to wonder why it differs from everything else they have read.

Sources are graded

A primary source is a producing board, a research institute, or the export standard itself — the document that defines the figure. A secondary source reports it: trade press, a retailer, an aggregator. Both appear here and both are labelled, because secondary sources lag standards changes by years and a reader is entitled to know which kind they are relying on.

When we are wrong

Corrections are logged against the record and the checked date moves. If a figure here disagrees with a source you trust, please tell us which source — a disagreement between two sources is itself information worth recording.