FLIGHT COFFEE COMPANY’S NEW MANIFESTO

For decades, coffee was reduced to a number.  80 or higher and it was Specialty grade, 90 or higher and it was the top 1% of coffee worldwide. That score, born from CQI and promoted by the SCA, attempted to summarize everything—terroir, farming, fermentation, roasting, brewing. Lives, prices, and reputations dangled from two digits. 

But coffee was never meant to be arithmetic. Coffee is a story. It is the way a natural processed Ethiopian coffee can taste like blueberries to one person and like badly fermented yogurt to another. It is the way jackfruit in India becomes mango in California, shaped not by defect but by memory, by culture, by what lives inside us- our personal stories. Numbers cannot measure that.

By 2025, the spell was broken. Scores were gamed, premiums dissolved, competitions narrowed. Farmers who once chased points found only disappointment. Nations began to write new frameworks—Brazil, ASEAN, others—all refusing to let one narrow system define a global, plural drink. The age of the single score ended.

And here we stand, cups in hand. At Flight Coffee, we taste in circles, not hierarchies. We share, we laugh, we connect. Our best-selling coffee is not our highest-scoring coffee, but it is the one that reminds someone of a Snickers bar, and another of the day after Halloween. That is the electricity of coffee—it awakens memory, creates dialogue, binds strangers.

Coffee has always been too alive to be caged. Soil, microbes, fermentations, roasters’ fire, the water in your kettle, the stories you bring to the table—all of it collides in the cup. Not as 82 or 90, but as peach, fig, milk chocolate, juicy sweetness, childhood, longing, joy...

The end of scoring an assigned numerical value is not loss. It is freedom. It is a return to coffee as connection—in a world where conversation has been thinned into text bubbles and emojis, where meaning gets lost in translation. Around the cupping table, we reclaim the sacred space of presence. We taste, we listen, we tell our stories, and in that exchange, we find one another.

Coffee has never been about numbers. It has always been about people. About the intimacy of sharing a flavor, a memory, a moment. About the possibility of sitting together, cup in hand, and saying: this is what I taste, this is who I am.

This is our manifesto: coffee is not a number. Coffee is communion. Coffee is us.

Claudia Q Barrett (retired Q Grader)