Difference Coffee
London
Difference Coffee started with a single aim, to identify the world’s best coffees, and to make them available to discerning coffee lovers.
Similar to wine, Arabica coffee is graded using a 100 point system, which was created by the the Speciality Coffee Association. Only licensed judges, known as Q Graders, can score coffee based on attributes such as flavour, aroma, aftertaste, etc. The tastiest of coffees, scoring 80 points and over, are deemed ‘Specialty grade’, representing a mere 1% of the world’s total coffee production.
Equipped with this knowledge, it is possible to go country by country, terroir by terroir, and identify the single estate which has managed to produce the highest scoring beans. This pursuit is relatively easy to attain – following regional coffee competitions which are part of the fabric of the coffee industry.
Difference Coffee now sources from the most prestigious and most rigorous coffee competitions, including: Cup of Excellence, Best of Panamaand the annual Kona Cupping Competition. To illustrate the level of scrutiny, a Cup of Excellence competition, with 300 entries, will consist of six rounds of evaluation by both national and international juries, with a total of 9,020 cups having been analysed before the top 10 winners are announced. Remarkably, the 10 finalists would have been cupped no fewer than 280 times. Our current collection, therefore, represents some of the rarest and highest graded Arabica coffees in the world.
