I love buying green beans from Sweet Maria’s. I’ve been roasting for 6 years now, and I’ve gotten the majority of my green beans from them. I was curious though, how well Q-scores trended with cost, so I pulled all their data and did some simple analysis. In short, I found a general trend with cost so you have to pay more to get higher scored beans, which should be higher quality. I also found certain features correlate more to cost than other.

The main caveat is that these beans are based on what Sweet Maria’s procures, which is based in part on their customer base. So any analysis can not generalize outside of Sweet Maria’s due to their curation. It would be very interesting to do this type of analysis across multiple sellers, but their data was not as easily accessible as Sweet Maria’s.

Q-Score

Sweet Maria’s has a slightly different cupping criteria than the SCA criteria summarized below:

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