Personality
Perky
to Quirky
Every coffee gets a number from 1 to 5. It's not a score, and it isn't about strength or caffeine — it's how wild the cup tastes. One end is comforting and familiar. The other is the coffee that makes you put the mug down and look at it.
Neither end is better. A 1 isn't a lesser coffee than a 5; it's a different mood. Most people have a favorite end, and plenty of us drink from both depending on the morning.
Where the number comes from.
We don't assign it by hand. It comes from two things we already know about a coffee: the flavor families its tasting notes land in, and how much the producer intervened. Chocolate, nuts and caramel pull it down. Fruit and florals push it up. A natural or a long ferment pushes it up again — that's where the funk comes from. Decaffeination pulls it back, because stripping the caffeine strips some of the volatiles with it.
It's deliberately coarse. Three inputs can't support more precision than this, and pretending otherwise would be false confidence. Think of it as a way to browse, not a cupping score.
A coffee we haven't cupped yet has no tasting notes, so it gets no number at all rather than a made-up middle. If you see a coffee with no dots, that's why.