Pointwashing: Coffee Scores Are Just a Sticker

The SCA/CQI scoring scale — still dominant in specialty coffee — very often doesn’t describe quality.
It describes interest.

This is one of the biggest cons in our industry.

What was meant to be a tool for sensory orientation has become a façade.
I call it pointwashing.

Pointwashing is a practice in which scores are treated as an objective and sufficient measure of the quality and price of green and roasted coffee. In reality, sensory analysis is frequently conducted under biased conditions, aligned with the logic of margin growth. Assigning a single number reduces the value of people’s work to one indicator — detached from real costs, relationships, and conditions of production. It is one of the tools of exploitation.

This is not the fringe of the system.
It is its daily routine.

Let’s talk about numbers.

I Drank the Evidence

For years, it’s looked the same. I buy “competition-level,” supposedly exceptional coffee — and what ends up in the cup disappoints. Recently, I bought a coffee advertised as “competition coffee.”

92.25 SCA points.

The description read like a mirror image of pointwashing itself:
“This is a coffee with great complexity, sticky sweetness, and higher acidity. We want to draw attention to its extremely high score and excellent price-to-quality ratio.”

Indeed — the price was €64 per kilogram.

And because the description didn’t sound like a coffee deserving such a high score, I couldn’t resist taking a closer look.

No surprises. In the cup — nothing matched.

The aroma was low in intensity, with stone fruit and chocolate notes, but also a clear acetic imbalance. The flavor was flat, grassy, at times musty. A short finish, alcoholic notes, drying bitterness. Thin body, astringent mouthfeel. Acidity was simple, citrusy, without energy.

The roast? Very light and uneven — perhaps flattering to someone’s technique, but not to the coffee itself.

Points versus reality — this wasn’t a subtle mismatch.
It was an obvious disconnect between the number and the experience.

Scores Were Meant to Orient — Not to Sell

The still-ubiquitous 100-point scale was introduced to standardize communication among professionals, not to become a sales label. It was never meant to function without context, calibration, and conversation.

Today, it works differently.

In market language, “having points” means “better coffee.”
More points mean higher price and prestige.
That’s enough.

Scores sell. And if they sell, they get abused.
And they’re hard to uproot. We’re trying.

A well-known industry organization has proposed an alternative model for assessing coffee value. While it removes a single final quality score, points remain in the affective layer — raising the question of whether this number will again be used as a shortcut for quality and price.

Let’s recall the scale:

90+ = Outstanding
86–89.75 = Excellent
80–85.75 = Very Good
<80 = Maybe good, but not specialty coffee

The Investigation

Let’s return to our “competition” coffee. I collected the scores attributed to the same lot along the supply chain.

The same coffee:

• producer (farm QC): 85–86
• importer: 92.25
• roastery: 92.25 (copy-paste?)
• my assessment (generously): 72–74
  without cup defects: 78–80

A gap of up to 20 points within a single chain.

The producer was genuinely surprised by the roastery’s score. The importer did not comment on the discrepancy with the producer’s assessment.

This is not a “difference of perception.”
It’s a failure of the reference system.

The Pointwashing Chain

I don’t assume bad intentions.
This is not a text about guilty individuals.
It’s about a mechanism.

• Coffee flavor is variable and dependent on countless factors: time, processing, transport, roasting, and preparation.
• The producer evaluates the coffee within a local context, at a specific moment in its life — and more points often mean higher potential returns.
• The importer buys the coffee at the producer’s price, then raises the declared score, because a higher score facilitates sales and justifies a higher price.
• The roastery trusts the importer, without access to the full production context or earlier assessments.
• Quality control at the roastery is weak, skipped, or replaced by reliance on a number rather than perception.
• The consumer trusts the roastery and the label.
• The flavor doesn’t match the promise, but the number “justifies” the experience and silences doubt.

This is how pointwashing shapes consumer knowledge, language, and sensory habits.

The number beats the cup.
The consumer doesn’t realize they’re allowed to say: “I don’t like this.”

Why It Matters

Is pointwashing just coincidence? Usually not intentional — but that doesn’t change the outcome.

It:

• rewards manipulation over integrity,
• teaches poor sensory habits,
• erodes trust,
• reduces human labor to a digit,
• deepens inequality in the name of “quality.”

This isn’t about one coffee.

It’s about honest and dishonest producers alike.
Roasters relying on other people’s scores.
Consumers learning to love something they don’t understand — because “it has points.”

It’s a language that stopped describing reality and started masking it.

Pointwashing distorts the values we insist on in The Better Coffee.

Sensory Justice Instead of Exploitation

In The Better Coffee, we speak of sensory justice.

We reject pointwashing and the logic of specialty that deepens inequality through sensory language. A shared vocabulary and perceptual honesty are conditions for quality and better — allowing sensory analysis to function as a scientific tool, not a marketing device.

This is not an attack on sensory analysis.
It’s a defense of its meaning — and of the language of perception itself.

The scoring system isn’t inherently bad.
It became a problem in a world where quality was tied directly to price, under conditions of constant scarcity.

The Line

When a number loses its connection to coffee people and to the coffee itself,
it becomes a sticker.

And a sticker is not a measure of quality.
It’s a persuasion device.

If honesty were the standard, we wouldn’t need anything else.
But it isn’t.

That’s why the industry — and consumers — deserve better frames of reference.

It was one cup.
But this story repeats itself every day.

It’s time to stop mistaking points for truth.