Quick discussion of the updated rating system

As I mentioned in an earlier post, last fall I started getting pretty serious about thinking about my coffee, really trying to taste all the intricacies of flavor, and so forth.  I also started maintaining a spreadsheet in which I rated the specialty coffees I was trying.  My rating system was fairly casual - I had it broken down into five options: Great, Good, Okay, Meh, and Bad.  As it happens, no coffee ever rated worse than Okay - which is what you would expect given how much specialty coffee costs per bag! - and there were obviously significant clusters at Good and Great.  This didn't matter so much when I was just keeping track of it for myself, but now that I've begun posting here about my coffee experiences, and sharing those ratings, it was a little blunt of an instrument.

So following up on a suggestion, I have changed the rating scale to a 10-point scale, arranged as follows:

10 - Superlative

9 - Great

8 - Very Good

7 - Good

6 - Above Average

5 - Passable

4 - Mediocre

3 - Meh

2 - Not Good

1 - Bad

I still expect the bottom three to be used infrequently if at all - when I re-rated my spreadsheet, only one of the 46 coffees I've rated so far scored as low as a 4 (and that wasn't even an Arabica).  Still, it offers at least some distinction, with coffees that I liked enough to consider "Great" divided into two groups that offer a little more shading.  While I've handed out more than a few Greats, only four of the coffees I've tried so far have earned a 10 from me.

For the purposes of this project I've added a little sidebar on the top right of the main blog page that contains a running tally of my ratings for each roaster I've tried.  Since I've ordered two coffees from each, I've simply added the scores together to get a total.  With only six states done so far, it's still a bit of a clustered list, but I think that will probably change somewhat as we go forward - though even with the more highly gradated scale, there are only so many options.  I'm not enough of an expert to feel like I could judge these coffees out of 100 even if I wanted to - and anyway while I feel confident enough in remembering what I thought about a relatively short list of coffees to update all my ratings back to October on a ten-point scale, I wouldn't feel comfortable converting them to a 100-point scale without trying them all again, which would be both expensive and also impossible since many of those coffees are literally no longer available (and even if I could get them again in the future they would be from a different harvest and thus not the same exact coffees - etc, etc).

Anyway, in a little more detail than what's in the sidebar, here's the list through the first six states:

1t. Verve (CA) - Honduras Miraflores (8) + Burundi Kamira (9) = 17

1t. Color (CO) - Peru San Antonio (8) + Rwanda Kanzu (9) = 17

3t. Prevail (AL) - Costa Rica Finca Sircof (6) + PNG Sigri Peaberry (7) = 13

3t. Kaladi Brothers (AK) - Kenya Nguvu AA+ (8) + Sumatra Mutu Batak (5) = 13

3t. Press (AZ) - Brazil Mogiano (6) + Bali Kintamani (7) = 13

3t. Airship (AR) - Sumatra Kerinci Honey (6) + Ethiopia Kochere Natural (7) = 13

As I said, a little bunched.  But I think that will change a bit as we go - there's plenty of room for roasters in the 14-16 range, and quite frankly there's room from 10-12 too.  I'd personally be shocked if anyone turned in an offering lower than 10 - that would require at least one of the coffees to be worse than passable, which again seems nearly impossible when we're talking specialty roasters.  But maybe in a state where there are very few options?  Honestly I'd rather not think that way.  There's room from 18-20 too, you know!  But Verve and Color will be tough acts to follow over the next few states, so let's just see how it goes.