EP 1114 Part 4 of 5 | What’s Wrong With Coffee Scoring? (George Howell) | Map It Forward
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Episode Description
This is part 4 of a new 5-part series on The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast by Map It Forward, hosted by Lee Safar. Our guest on the podcast for this series is George Howell, founder of George Howell Coffee, returning for the 2026 edition of our annual series, “The Coffee Industry According to George Howell.”
In this episode, we explore how the coffee industry scores, describes, and communicates quality.
George says he still believes strongly in scoring coffee. Inside George Howell Coffee, scores provide a shared language for evaluating green coffee and roasting, with sweetness and cleanliness at the centre of how quality is assessed.
For consumers, however, George takes a different approach. Rather than communicating numerical scores, the focus shifts to describing what the coffee actually tastes like and giving customers the information that is useful to them.
That distinction opens up a much broader conversation about the role of scoring, commenting, record-keeping, transparency, and the information different stakeholders actually need across the coffee supply chain.
George reflects on the original cupping form he provided to the Specialty Coffee Association of America and questions what is genuinely new about the industry’s shift towards commenting on coffee. He explains the detailed records George Howell Coffee maintains on coffees, including defects, density, moisture content, and water activity, and how those records become part of an ongoing process of learning.
We also discuss how much information consumers actually want, why transparency does not necessarily mean communicating every piece of information to everyone, and why the experience in the cup remains fundamental.
The conversation then turns to one of George’s frustrations with coffee scoring: the tendency to compress scores into a narrow range in the mid-to-high 80s.
George argues that an exceptional coffee should be judged according to its own potential. A beautiful Bourbon does not need to taste like a Panama Gesha to deserve a score in the 90s, and different origins, varieties, and styles of coffee should have the opportunity to express exceptional quality on their own terms.
We discuss whether external information about origin, variety, farm, and reputation can influence how coffees are evaluated, why different coffee-producing countries should develop their own expressions of quality, and whether our scoring systems leave enough room to communicate genuine enthusiasm for extraordinary coffee.
Connect with George Howell Coffee:
https://georgehowellcoffee.com/