SCA Sensory Skills Foundation: Build Confidence in Coffee Tasting
SCA Roasting Intermediate: Three-Day Coffee Roasting Course
Learn to control your roast, repeat your results, and understand how your decisions affect flavour. This three-day SCA Roasting Intermediate course combines roasting exercises, coffee measurements, and tasting, with both practical and theory exams.
Can you repeat a good roast?
You’ll create a reference roast, record its measurements, and aim to match its colour in two more batches. Using a colour meter and tracking weight loss, density, and volume helps you judge consistency with more than a final temperature.
This exercise gives you a practical way to check your work and identify what needs adjusting in the next batch.
Connect roast profiles with flavor
If two coffees finish at the same colour, will they taste the same? You’ll compare coffees with different development times and explore how roasting choices affect fruitiness, acidity, chocolate, caramel, and nutty flavours.
You’ll also learn to read rate of rise, the speed at which bean temperature changes, and use it to understand how your roast is progressing.
Before each roast, we’ll look at the variables that influence your approach. How should moisture and density affect heat application? Why might the first batch of the day behave differently from later batches? These questions help you make better decisions when the coffee or roasting conditions change.
Evaluate green coffee through sample roasting
You’ll learn how consistent sample roasting helps you compare supplier samples and assess coffee before buying. We cover sample records, preparation, and the roasting protocols that make comparisons more useful.
Practical training and exams
Intermediate includes hands-on roasting exercises and a practical exam, alongside the theory assessment. You’ll practise recording your roasts, measuring the results, and repeating a target roast.
You can book Foundation + Intermediate, or sign up for all three SCA Roasting levels together and complete them in order.
SCA Sensory Skills Intermediate: Develop Your Tasting and Evaluation Skills
Build on the basics, sharpen your sensory skills and learn to evaluate coffee with a more structured approach.
The SCA Sensory Skills Intermediate course is for coffee professionals who are ready to take their tasting further. Through guided exercises and cuppings, you’ll practice recognizing differences between coffees, describing what you perceive and using sensory tools to communicate your findings.
You’ll also explore how to organize tasting sessions and work with others on sensory evaluation: skills you can bring back to your café, roastery or coffee business.
Taste, Smell and Coffee Perception
Deepen your understanding of how taste and smell shape your experience of coffee. Practice recognizing sensory differences and identifying fragrances.
Coffee Flavor Vocabulary
Work with the SCA Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel and the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon to develop a more precise, shared language for describing coffee.
Cupping and Sensory Evaluation
Build on your cupping experience and explore sensory evaluation methods. Practice comparing coffees and communicating what you find.
SCA Coffee Value Assessment
Continue working with the descriptive and affective assessments and explore how they support a structured approach to evaluating coffee.
Organizing Sensory Sessions
Learn about organizing cuppings and explore how to set up and work with a sensory analysis group. Take those ideas back to your team and put your tasting skills into practice.
Who Is This Course For?
Intermediate is suited to baristas, roasters, buyers and other coffee professionals who have some experience with sensory evaluation and want to develop a more structured tasting practice.
If you’re new to coffee tasting or want to strengthen your fundamentals first, start with Sensory Skills Foundation. You’ll have a chance to practice the basics before building on them in Intermediate.
A written exam assesses your understanding of the Intermediate course material. A practical assessment evaluates your ability to recognize differences in coffee characteristics and identify fragrances.
SCA Sensory Skills Professional: Develop Your Tasting and Evaluation Skills
Develop your sensory skills, lead more consistent tasting sessions, and use what you learn to make informed coffee decisions.
You’ve spent time at the cupping table. You know how to describe what you taste. Now you’re ready to put those skills to work in a bigger way.
SCA Sensory Skills Professional builds on Intermediate and explores how sensory evaluation can support quality control and decision-making across a coffee business. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll practice assessing coffee characteristics, interpreting results and designing sensory tests for real business questions.
You’ll also learn what it takes to build and support a sensory panel, so you can bring a more consistent approach to tasting across your team.
Advanced Sensory Perception
Explore how we perceive taste, aroma and mouthfeel, and why people can experience the same coffee differently. Practice assessing the intensity of attributes such as acidity, bitterness and sweetness.
Coffee Flavor and Sensory Profiling
Use the SCA Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel and World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon to describe coffee with greater precision. Learn how to build a sensory profile and work toward a shared vocabulary with other tasters.
SCA Coffee Value Assessment
Practice using the SCA descriptive and affective assessment forms. Learn to record a coffee’s sensory characteristics and evaluate your impression of its quality using the Coffee Value Assessment framework.
Defects, Staling and Roasting Problems
Explore flavors associated with coffee defects, staling and roasting problems. Develop your ability to recognize these characteristics and understand how they can affect the coffee you serve, buy or roast.
Sensory Testing and Bias
Learn how expectations, sample presentation and other sources of bias can influence a tasting. Explore ways to design sensory tests that produce more reliable, useful results.
Sensory Panels and Calibration
Discover how to set up a sensory panel, support and train tasters, and check panel performance. Practice working toward shared reference points so your team can communicate more consistently about coffee.
Sensory Evaluation in Your Business
Explore how sensory testing can help answer practical questions about quality control, shelf life and new products. You’ll also learn about consumer testing and how customer preferences can inform decisions.
Who Is This Course For?
Professional is designed for coffee professionals who want to take a leading role in sensory evaluation. It’s particularly relevant for roasters, green coffee buyers, quality control professionals, trainers and café or roastery managers.
SCA Sensory Skills Intermediate is required before taking this course. SCA Roasting Intermediate and Green Coffee Intermediate are also highly recommended.
The course includes hands-on activities throughout your training. An online written exam assesses your understanding of the Professional course material, and a practical exam evaluates your sensory skills through a range of activities.
After successfully passing the required assessments, you’ll earn an internationally recognized SCA Sensory Skills Professional certificate. Your certificate also counts toward SCA Skills Diploma requirements.
Explore the SCA Skills Diploma pathways
