The Q(ueen) is Dead: CQI's selling of the Q, what it means, and where we go from here
- Mokhtar Alkhanshali
- May 6
- 12 min read
I love coffee. I love coffee cupping. I love Q Graders. I love Q Grading. I love the Coffee Quality Institute. And I love the SCA—kind of… sometimes.
I love Q Graders so much, I even love the pretentious ones. The obnoxious ones. And there are a lot of pretentious, obnoxious ones. I wrote a blogpost about them. But I love them anyway.
Why?
It’s like when you’ve been traveling for a while—really out there, in it—eating food you don’t recognize, hearing languages you don’t speak, doing your best to connect, to listen, to adapt. And then, suddenly, you run into someone from home. You hear your own accent. You talk about the most mundane ‘back home’ type of stuff. Back home you maybe wouldn’t even like this person. But still—it feels good, you connect in a way you can’t with others.
The day I became a Q Grader was one of the proudest days of my life. It was an unbelievable feeling. I later found out I was the first Arab Arabica Q Grader in history. CQI even printed a short story about me in their newsletter. It made the news in Yemen. My whole family heard about it.
But anyway, that’s what Q Graders are for me. They’re my people. It doesn’t matter where we’re from—Japan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia—when we’re in a cupping lab together, calibrating, arguing about a single point up or down, it just feels like home.
Q Grading, for me, is my homeland in coffee. It’s where I come from. It’s where I learned to speak a language. It’s how I learned to hear the voices of coffees, and the people behind them.
So when I found out that CQI had sold over the Q system—my homeland—to the SCA without so much as a conversation?
Yeah. I took it personally.
So buckle up. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll walk you through it. If you do (industry peeps, I’m looking at you), feel free to skip ahead. Either way, it’s going to get bumpy.
I. The Most Hipster S**t I’ve Ever Heard
I was on the island of Socotra, one of the most remote and surreal places on Earth. At the time, Yemen was in the middle of a war, and flights were nearly impossible. We had managed to land and were staying at a small hotel, one of the only ones open.
In the mornings, I’d wake up and head to the breakfast area with my hand grinder and pour-over setup. I was traveling with my own coffee, as always. There were a few other travelers there too—Europeans, quiet, serious. At first, I thought they were mercenaries. They thought the same about me.
Eventually, we struck up a conversation. I told them I was a coffee Q Grader—a kind of certified coffee taster, what I sometimes call a coffee sommelier. One of them laughed and said it was the most preposterous hipster s**t he’d ever heard.
But then I explained. I told him how, before I took the Q course, I had only tasted maybe five truly special coffees in my life. I didn’t understand what people meant when they said they tasted strawberry, beef broth, baby carrots in a cup. It felt like a foreign language spoken in front of me. But one I desperately wanted to be a part of.
The Q course changed that. It taught me how to evaluate coffee, how to taste with clarity and communicate with precision. It gave me the language of coffee. And more importantly, it gave me a tool I could take home.
When I returned to Yemen, I traveled to 32 regions collecting coffee samples. And for the first time, I didn’t have to wait for someone in another country to tell me if our coffee was “good enough.” I could taste it myself. I could cup those samples and make decisions rooted in knowledge, not guesswork. I could walk into a farmer’s home and say: This is special. Here’s why. Here’s what it’s worth.
That’s what the Q does. It doesn’t just empower people like me—it give farmers a seat at the table. It allows us to set our own standards, understand our own value, and speak with authority in a market that before the Q, rarely listened.
By the end of that week on Socotra, that same skeptical traveler who laughed at me told me he wanted to invest in my company.
He never did. But the point is—he got it.
II. What Is Q Grading?
To understand what’s at stake right now, you first have to understand what Q grading is—and what it represents.
The Q Grader program, developed by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI), was designed to create a universal standard for evaluating coffee quality. It’s a certification that allows a coffee professional—whether a farmer, roaster, trader, or barista—to speak the same sensory language anywhere on Earth.
When someone becomes a Q Grader, they’re not just earning a credential. They’re learning how to calibrate their palate to a global standard. They’re trained to identify dozens of aroma compounds, assess defects, judge balance, sweetness, acidity, and more. It’s a grueling, six-day intensive, and 22-part exam that pushes your sensory skills to the edge.
And it’s not just for professionals in cafés or labs, actually very much the opposite. It was designed with the farmer as the primary concern. Farmers who once relied on exporters or foreign buyers to tell them whether their coffee was “special”, with this language at their disposal, can taste, score, and negotiate based on the value they know their coffee has. In a global industry where power has historically moved downstream, the Q system pushed it back upstream, at least to a degree.
For producers—especially smallholders—the Q is not just about tasting coffee. It’s about gaining leverage.
And for many of us, it was also about community. Each Q course gathers people from across the world—Mexico, Korea, Kenya, Kuwait. We come together in labs, in places like Calgary , San Rafael, Addis Ababa, and we spend six intense days learning, failing, tasting, pushing each other. You never forget your Q classmates. It creates lifelong bonds.
That’s what it means to be a Q Grader. It’s not just a title—it’s a shared language, a shared standard, and for many of us, a shared beginning.
III. The Form(s)
At the heart of the Q Grading system is a form.
When you learn to cup coffee through the Coffee Quality Institute, what you’re really learning is how to read, interpret, and fill out this form. That form becomes your map—it’s how you assess aroma, flavor, acidity, balance, aftertaste, defects. It’s how you score a coffee. That score becomes a marker of value (though far from the only one) and those assessments are a shared language that help us discuss and improve coffee quality.
What the Q system accomplished was to standardize that language across the world. From Panama to Papua New Guinea, a Q Grader in one country could sit at the table with a Q Grader in another and speak fluently about what they were tasting. It gave us a shared framework, not just for evaluating coffee, but for talking about it in a way that everyone in the supply chain could understand.
Now, over the past year or so, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has begun to critique that form.
Their main concern is that it combines multiple types of sensory evaluation into a single scoring process. Drawing from sensory science, the SCA argues that a proper evaluation should separate what they call descriptive data (i.e. what a coffee tastes like) from affective responses (i.e. whether the taster likes it or considers it to be high quality). According to the SCA, these two tasks rely on different psychological modes, and asking cuppers to perform them simultaneously creates confusion and inconsistency. To fix this, they’ve introduced what they call a “discrete tasks” model—splitting the evaluation into two separate forms, each with its own method and scoring logic.
This is the basis of their new system, what they call Coffee Value Assessment (CVA).
But the industry hasn’t adopted it.
Nearly no one has, certainly no one that I or my colleagues know. Despite the rollout, despite the marketing, most of us have stayed with the original Q form. And not because it’s familiar.
As one of my friends put it, the CVA is “a solution to a problem no one has.”
That’s not to say it’s without merit. I actually think there’s a lot of value in what the SCA has done—especially the research that led to the CVA. Their breakdown of how cupping scores are shaped by subjectivity, preference, cultural bias—that’s real. And giving language to those things is useful. It helps people articulate and thereby, better understand what most of us—once we get into the real world outside of our Q Grading class—all have to contend with.
But when it comes to practical, day-to-day cupping—buying, selling, evaluating—most of that added complexity just gets in the way. The CVA doesn’t improve upon the Q. It just complicates it.
But, it doesn’t really matter right? It’s not like the SCA can somehow strong arm the entire industry into using their new standard… right?
Well, last week, the unthinkable happened.
CQI handed over the entire Q program to SCA. Without warning, without transparency, without meaningful input from the instructors and professionals who had built their careers on it.
It’s not a collaboration. It’s a transfer of power that feels like a hostile takeover, though there’s no clear indication that is the case.
CQI now cannot administer Q courses, certify graders or instructors, or use the Q in any meaningful way. And the standard they created—the one that the entire industry uses—will now be replaced by one that no one really cares for. CQI, for their part, says they’re going to focus now on development work at origin. But the program that defined them—the one that created a global language for coffee—is no longer theirs and, by extension, no longer ours.
IV. Fallout
Most of us first found out about this first through social media. Students have been left confused and many have already cancelled their registrations. Courses scheduled, have had to get cancelled as they’re suddenly rendered obsolete. Labs that had invested tens of thousands of dollars are left in limbo. People have already bought coffees to teach upcoming courses. Flights booked for calibrations that no longer mean anything. Students mid-way through certification paths are now stuck. Some had saved money for years to become Q Graders—believing it would open doors. And now, they are being told that their certifications are being absorbed into something else. Diluted. Devalued.
And to be honest all of these are just the tip of the ice berg.
A system that took two decades to build is being dismantled in front of our eyes at a frightening pace. It’s a massive loss of institutional structure—but more than that, it’s a complete loss of trust. There was no lead-up. No announcement. No proper transition. One day, the Q system was still the backbone of global coffee quality. The next, it was under new management—without the consent or even the knowledge of the people who built it.
The reaction was swift—and as I'm sure you can imagine—furious.
At an emergency meeting with CQI leadership, instructors around the world voiced what many were feeling: betrayal. Many were frustrated. Some were furious. Some were heartbroken. Others were just stunned. Everyone had questions. How could this decision have been made without consulting those most affected by it? Why was there no public notice? Why were financial terms being kept confidential (they have since been released…peanuts to be honest)? Why wasn’t SCA even present to answer for any of this?
CQI’s leadership admitted the deal was finalized only days earlier. They cited financial pressure, time constraints, legal limitations. And they insisted the transition was the only way to preserve the organization. There are instructors who’ve spent the last decade building their lives around this system. They’ve opened labs, trained hundreds of students, and upheld the integrity of a standard that means something. And they weren’t even told it was being taken away from them.
And for those of us at origin, it hits even harder.
The Q is not just a technical program. It’s how we build credibility. It’s how we push back against gatekeepers. It’s how we train farmers to taste and sell their coffee with confidence. It’s easily our biggest form of leverage. We know how good our stuff is and we know how much you want it! So yeah, you’re gonna have to pay top dollar.
This isn’t just a change in administration. It’s a rupture. And many of us are still trying to figure out what it means.
V. What It Means
Right now, I see a few possible futures unfolding:
1. Everyone Moves to the SCA’s New Standard
Let’s be honest: this seems unlikely. Though I don’t think it’s entirely impossible.
Maybe SCA thinks the reason people haven’t adopted the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA) is because they’re stuck in their ways. Maybe they think it’s just a matter of time and training. But that’s simply not true.
People aren’t using the CVA because they don’t like it. It overcomplicates something that was already working. It tries to solve problems no one actually has. It’s not just unnecessary—it’s unhelpful. This isn’t about resistance to change. It’s about rejecting a change that strips clarity, but more important than that: consensus. A consensus that has taken decades to form organically.
So no—I don’t believe the industry is going to rally around the CVA. It’s been out there for over a year, and no one has adopted it. That’s not inertia. That’s rejection.
2. Decentralization
This seems far more likely.
We may start to see multiple organizations, labs, and instructors emerge with their own certification paths. Cupper certification, as we know it, may fragment—which I don’t think is an entirely bad thing. The worst thing about it is that the more well known instructors and teaching institutions will likely be fine in this scenario. But the smaller ones, and the individual instructors who really benefitted from having the Q licence next to their names, will seriously be hurt.
The main point is, sure, there was a time when only Socrates could teach you philosophy, but after that, different schools developed. Some survived and some died. Now, you can learn philosophy from Oxford, City College of San Francisco, Al-Azhar, etc. And if one of those institutions grants you an authorization, it carries some weight.
The same could happen here. Different schools, different approaches—but a shared foundation.
And to be honest, this was already happening. Q instructors have never taught exactly the same way. Expectations vary from one lab to another. And in my experience (not to expose anyone) the best Q instructors are the ones who just care whether you can cup and don’t nit-pick about you ticking every little box perfectly. The best instructors are the ones who might, with a slight nod, let you go back into the red room a fourth time… those who know, know.
Point being, what matters is the foundation. The language itself.
3. A New Accrediting Organization Emerges
This is an ambitious, though I think very possible scenario.
The community—especially instructors, lab owners, and long-time contributors—could come together and form a new body. One that carries forward the original spirit and work of the Q.
But this would be a massive undertaking.
We’re already dealing with crisis-level issues: climate change, volatile markets, speculative pricing, collapsing yields, supply chain shocks, tariffs. The idea of building a new global certifying body from scratch, in the middle of all this, feels overwhelming.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it urgent? Absolutely. But it’s going to take serious leadership and coordination—because the need is real, and the moment is fragile.
4. The Guild Route
The last potential future I see here is the formation of a guild. And I’ll be totally transparent here, this is what I'm hoping for and what I think is most definitely the best way forward.
Historically, guilds have played a vital role in elevating standards within the specialty coffee industry. The Roasters Guild, for example, set a precedent for rigorous, peer-driven education rooted in mentorship, community, and hands-on learning. A similar model applied to sensory education—a Coffee Tasters Guild—could fill the growing vacuum left by the SCA’s consolidation of authority and restore the kind of democratic, accessible framework the industry once thrived on.
This guild wouldn’t be another certifying body chasing profit. It would be a member-led, volunteer-driven organization that values contribution over compliance. Structured pathways—from apprentice to master—could help codify the skills and knowledge we all agree are essential, without enforcing rigid orthodoxy. It could create room for diversity in cupping methods, context-specific calibration, and regional knowledge—rather than forcing everyone into a single mold.
Most importantly, it would return power to the broader community. Roasters, producers, instructors, and cuppers could all help shape standards, curriculum, and evaluation methods together—preserving the integrity of sensory education while ensuring it evolves with the needs of a changing industry. This is not about nostalgia; it’s about building a better model. One rooted in trust, not centralization. One that lifts up the many, not the few.
A coffee tasters guild wouldn’t just be a response to the present moment—it would be a blueprint for a future where excellence is shared, not hoarded.
In conclusion, my heart is with everyone affected by this decision—from instructors and lab owners to students and producers who built their credibility through the Q. I feel this with you.
And to the Coffee Quality Institute—thank you. What you built over the past two decades changed lives, mine included. The Q wasn’t just a certification; it was a community, a shared language. While this decision is painful and confusing, I understand that leadership comes with hard calls.
But we need clarity. We need to understand why this happened—and why it seems your most valuable program was let go so quietly. Not just for closure, but to shape what comes next.
This is the biggest shock I’ve seen in our industry. But we’re still here. Let’s keep talking, keep tasting, and keep building—together.