“I think many people confuse cup score with flavor notes. Especially with natural processing, where flavor notes can be over-accentuated, many people assume that's automatically a high-scoring coffee.”
Coffee Roaster Warm Up Sessions · Food & Beverage · November 2026
Context
Kutrovski draws the line between flavor notes and cup score, the core claim of the episode. Wild, intense flavor notes, common in natural-processed coffees, lead buyers to assume a high-quality coffee when that isn't necessarily so.
Transcript
…different processing, all kinds of different variables and all this stuff, we've kind of lost almost a calibrated idea of quality. So now somebody can say, hey, that's an 86. And for somebody, that's like, what do you mean? That's an 87. But man, between an 86 and an 87 is a world of a difference.
Yep.
It's, it's, it's a huge difference. And, you know, this is just a part of the conversation, which I'll end my ramp, my rant here, is that I think that we, I think many people confuse cup score with flavor notes.
Yep.
And especially when it comes to like natural processing processes where flavor notes can be over accentuated and highlighted, many people, I think, assume that that's automatically a high-scoring coffee.
Right, right.
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