Is Specialty Coffee Really Global?

Hamburg, Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

What Germany Taught Me About Taste, Hospitality, and the Expectations We Carry With Us

When we talk about specialty coffee, we often talk as if it is a global language.

We use the same vocabulary: washed, natural, anaerobic, floral, tea-like, juicy, clean, transparent, high-altitude, traceable, community, quality. We share brewing recipes, follow the same competitions, read the same green-coffee reports, and look at many of the same influential cafés and roasters. Or at least I want to believe we do that.

It is easy to believe that specialty coffee is becoming globally standardized, that a good coffee should taste a certain way, that a good café should look a certain way, and that a good barista should provide a recognizable kind of service.

But is that actually true?

My recent time in Germany made me question that assumption.

As a specialty coffee professional I don't experience coffee simply as a tourist, I wish I could, but the coffee geek in me is always "living the experience" as a coffee person.  I buy green coffee. I roast. I teach. I cup professionally. I work every day inside this industry. That means I inevitably walk into a coffee shop carrying technical knowledge, sensory references, preferences and expectations with me.

But I also walked into those cafés carrying something else: my culture.

That part became much more important than I expected.

The coffees I tasted, the roast profiles I encountered, the way drinks were served, the interaction with baristas and even what I interpreted as hospitality sometimes felt different from what I am accustomed to. There were moments I loved, moments I questioned, and moments that irritated me.

The easy reaction would have been to decide that one place was doing coffee correctly and another incorrectly.

The more interesting reaction was to ask why I felt that way.

Nord Coast Coffee Roastery, Hamburg, Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

A Global Industry Does Not Necessarily Create a Global Experience

Specialty coffee today is extraordinarily international. Coffee may be grown in Ethiopia, Colombia or Panama, purchased by a European importer, roasted in Berlin, prepared on equipment manufactured somewhere else and served to a customer visiting from Miami.

Knowledge moves almost as quickly as the coffee.

The Specialty Coffee Association itself now defines specialty coffee more broadly than a numerical cupping score, describing it as coffee or a coffee experience recognized for distinctive attributes that create significant value in the marketplace. [1] That definition matters because it acknowledges something our industry has sometimes struggled to express: coffee value does not exist exclusively inside the liquid.

The Coffee Value Assessment has pushed this idea further by separating different forms of evaluation. Describing the sensory attributes of a coffee is not the same exercise as determining how much somebody likes it. CVA distinguishes descriptive assessment from affective assessment precisely because description and impression of quality are different sensory tasks. [2]

That distinction sounds technical, but Germany made it very practical for me.

I could recognize that a coffee had particular characteristics and still not particularly enjoy drinking it.

I could understand what a roaster was attempting to express and still think the roast had gone further toward lightness than I personally found pleasurable.

And I could recognize that a café might be respected internationally while deciding that the experience I received there was not one I wanted to repeat.

None of those statements necessarily contradict one another.

That is where the idea of a completely global specialty-coffee culture begins to become complicated. We may share protocols. But we do not share identical palates.

We may share vocabulary. But we do not necessarily attach exactly the same value to what that vocabulary describes.

And we certainly do not arrive at the café carrying identical cultural expectations.

Speicherstadt Spezialitäten Roastery, Hamburg, Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

The Cup Was Challenging Me Too

Berlin has played an important role in European specialty coffee, and I arrived wanting to experience several names I had known for years.

At Bonanza, one of Berlin’s early specialty coffee roasters, I had a small experience that stayed with me. We arrived around 6:00 p.m., roughly an hour before closing, and wanted to order espressos and a pour-over. The espressos were available, but we were told that pour-over service had already stopped for the day. At the time, that felt strange to me because the café was still open.

Bonanza has been roasting in Berlin since 2006 and identifies itself as one of the pioneers of European specialty coffee. [3] I knew where I was. I knew the reputation. And because of that, perhaps I arrived with even more expectations than an ordinary customer would.

Was ending pour-over service before closing objectively wrong? Not necessarily. A business can establish its service procedures however it determines necessary for its operation.

But as a customer, I also had a reaction: if the café is open, why can't I order one of the coffees I came specifically to experience?

Those two realities can coexist.

Bonanza Coffee Roasters, Berlín-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

At Five Elephant, the experience was very different. I met Guy, and the interaction became a conversation about coffee rather than simply a transaction. He was warm, interested and generous. We talked, we connected, and he gave me coffee to take with me.

Five Elephant describes itself as a Berlin roaster that has been operating since 2010, sourcing and roasting specialty coffees while operating cafés in the city. [4]

What I remember most, however, is not a specification from a coffee bag. I do remember the human interaction. That should tell us something.

Five Elephant, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

At Coffee Circle, I had a positive experience. The atmosphere felt more approachable to me, and the interaction felt comfortable without needing to reproduce the kind of hospitality I am accustomed to elsewhere. That distinction became important during the trip because it reminded me that there was no single “German” or “Berlin” way of doing specialty coffee. Within the same city, I could experience very different interpretations of service, atmosphere and customer interaction. Coffee Circle did not need to feel like Miami or Buenos Aires for me to feel welcome. It simply worked for me as an experience.

Coffee Circle, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

At Ben Rahim, I had almost the opposite reaction. The interaction felt abrupt and unfriendly to me. I left with an impression that had relatively little to do with the technical quality of the coffee.

And that is when the question became more uncomfortable. Was the service objectively bad? Was I interpreting a different communication style through the expectations I brought from somewhere else? Or was it simply poor hospitality?

Those are not the same question.

Ben Rahim, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

At The Barn, the experience was interesting for a different reason. This was a place whose influence on contemporary European specialty coffee I already knew, and its approach to roasting is very deliberate. The Barn has built much of its identity around light roasting, clarity and the expression of origin.

That made the visit more useful to me, not less. Some of the coffees pushed lightness further than I personally would, but instead of reducing the experience to whether I liked the roast, I found myself thinking about what we mean when we use words such as clarity, transparency and origin expression. Those concepts are often treated as though they automatically increase as roast degree becomes lighter, and I do not think the relationship is that simple.

A lighter roast can certainly preserve characteristics that would be obscured by greater roast development, but lightness itself is not evidence of transparency. Roasting is still a transformation, and the objective is still to make the potential of the green coffee accessible in the cup. For me, The Barn became less a question of agreeing or disagreeing with a roasting philosophy and more an opportunity to examine where my own interpretation of that balance sits.

That is an important distinction because I did not travel to Germany looking for cafés that would confirm what I already believe. The interesting experiences were often the ones that made me question why I believe it in the first place. 

The Barn, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

We Carry Our Definition of Hospitality With Us

I come from cultures where hospitality tends to be expressive. Warmth is communicated visibly. Conversation matters. A customer is often acknowledged through tone, body language, explanation and interaction. I don't intend to say it is perfect because I don't think it is. But when it is good, you can totally have a blast just for the service. When it is bad...it is really bad!

My expectations around hospitality do not come only from being a coffee professional or from my cultural background. Before moving to Miami, I was deeply involved in building and operating Café Registrado in Buenos Aires with my husband Dylan Thome, a project that combined a coffee shop, roastery and education center and grew rapidly within Argentina's emerging specialty-coffee scene. I was responsible for areas ranging from green-coffee buying and roasting to training the baristas and developing the coffee and tea  program. That experience taught me that hospitality is not an abstract idea. It is operational. It is created through decisions about service, training, workflow, communication and, ultimately, how a customer feels when they walk through the door.

So, of course, I carried that with me to Germany. Or to be honest, wherever I go.

It would be intellectually lazy to experience a more reserved or direct interaction and conclude, "Germans are rude." Culture affects communication, expectations and interpretations, and what feels distant to one person may feel perfectly normal and efficient to another.

But cultural difference should not become an excuse for everything either. A coffee shop is still a hospitality business. That distinction matters to me.

Hospitality does not require everyone to perform the same personality. A Berlin barista does not have to behave like a Miami barista, and neither needs to perform some artificial international version of friendliness.

But customers still need to feel acknowledged.

The question is not whether every café should provide the same style of hospitality. The question is whether hospitality can remain culturally authentic while still making someone feel welcome.

Five Elephant reminded me that it can.

My experience at Ben Rahim made me think about what happens when it does not.

And Bonanza made me think about the difference between operational rules and the experience those rules produce for the person on the other side of the counter.

The coffee was only one part of what I was perceiving.

Science gives us good reason to take that seriously. Sensory research consistently shows that food and beverage perception is influenced not only by intrinsic characteristics but by extrinsic information, expectations and environmental context. [5] Research specifically focused on coffee has likewise demonstrated that the broader multisensory environment can influence how the coffee-drinking experience is perceived. [6]

In other words, we never experience the liquid completely alone.

We experience the room. The cup. The language. The person serving us. What happened five minutes earlier. What we expected before arriving. And, importantly, who we are.

Ben Rahim, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

Then There Was the Roasting

The other part of Germany that challenged me was the coffee itself.

Berlin has become strongly associated with light roasting among specialty-coffee professionals, and some of the coffees I encountered pushed that philosophy considerably further than what I normally prefer (I consider myself a light roast kind of person).

Germany made me think again about something that specialty coffee sometimes treats too casually: light roast is not automatically synonymous with transparency, and extraction problems should not be confused with roast style.

In several cups I encountered a distinctly saline character. I did not interpret that as an intrinsic characteristic of the coffee, nor as a consequence of roast degree. To me, it was clearly an extraction problem.

Roasting lightly can preserve acidity, aromatics and characteristics that are easily obscured by more aggressive roasting. But "lighter" cannot become a synonym for "better" without examination.

The purpose of roasting is not to prove how little heat we can apply.

The purpose is to transform green coffee successfully enough to make its desirable sensory potential accessible in the cup.

That distinction matters because sensory interpretation becomes sloppy when every unusual characteristic in the cup is attributed to origin or roasting. Extraction can distort a coffee dramatically. Water chemistry, brew ratio, contact time, grind distribution, agitation and overall extraction balance can push a cup toward sensations that do not represent the coffee particularly well.

So the question for me was not, “Is this what the coffee tastes like?” I knew it was not.

The more interesting question was why an extraction presenting that character was being served in a highly regarded specialty-coffee environment.

Roasting and extraction are separate stages of translation.

A very light roast may require a different extraction strategy because its structure, solubility and development differ from a medium or darker roast. If the brewing approach does not account for that, the resulting cup can become unbalanced even when the roast itself is intentional and technically sound.

This is where ideology can enter specialty coffee from both directions.

One person may blame every difficult cup on underdevelopment.

Another may defend every difficult cup simply because the coffee was roasted very light.

Neither position is useful.

In the cups I am referring to, I was confident about what I perceived: there was a distinctly salty or saline character.

I would not choose to serve a coffee with that particular expression, or by this situation, to drink it. But I also did not see the customers around me reacting negatively. People were drinking the coffee, the café was operating normally, and there was no reason for me to assume that everyone in that room interpreted the cup the way I did.

Perhaps their regular customers are accustomed to that extraction style. Perhaps some genuinely enjoy it. Perhaps others perceive the same saline character but do not consider it important enough to diminish their experience.

This is exactly where sensory description and preference have to remain separate.

Dylan and I, enjoying coffee in Berlin-Germany, 2026.

But Here Is the Difficult Part: Maybe I Simply Didn't Prefer It

Coffee professionals have historically been very good at converting preference into authority.

We taste something we like and call it excellent.

We taste something we dislike and immediately start searching for the defect.

That is one of the habits sensory science is forcing us to reconsider.

The separation between descriptive and affective assessment in the SCA Coffee Value Assessment is particularly relevant here. Descriptive assessment asks us to identify and quantify sensory characteristics. Affective assessment addresses impression of quality. They are intentionally separated because what something is and how somebody values it should not be collapsed into one supposedly objective judgment. [2]

Germany forced me to apply that principle to myself.

When I tasted a coffee that in my opinion was extremely lighter than I prefer, I asked myself: Is this coffee beyond light roasted, or just do not like this roasting philosophy?

Those are different conclusions.

When I experienced a service style that felt distant, I had to ask:

Is this poor hospitality, or am I encountering hospitality expressed through a different cultural framework?

Again, different conclusions.

Professional experience does not eliminate preference.

If anything, experience can sometimes make preference more difficult to recognize because we become very good at explaining why we prefer what we prefer.

That explanation can sound remarkably similar to objectivity.

Quality and Preference Are Not the Same Thing

This distinction may be one of the most important conversations happening in specialty coffee.

Quality is not meaningless. Technical evaluation matters. Defects exist. Roasting defects exist. Extraction can be measured. Green coffee can be physically evaluated. Sensory attributes can be described systematically. Professional expertise matters.

But preference matters too, and pretending it does not exist does not make our evaluation more scientific.

Cross-cultural consumer research on specialty coffee has found that preferences for coffee characteristics and quality-related attributes vary between populations. [8] That should not surprise us. Taste develops within culture, repeated exposure, memory, expectation and individual physiology.

If one coffee drinker prefers a very light, highly acidic coffee with delicate florality while another prefers more sweetness, developed aromatics and body, we do not necessarily have an educated consumer and an uneducated one.

We may have two people assigning value differently.

This is where specialty coffee occasionally becomes unnecessarily hierarchical.

We educate people about flavor, and education is valuable.

But education should expand someone's ability to perceive and understand a coffee. It should not tell them what they are required to enjoy.

That distinction became particularly clear to me in Germany because I was surrounded by respected coffee businesses doing work that sometimes differed from the decisions I would make in my own roastery.

The fact that I would do something differently does not automatically make the other approach wrong.

But the reputation of a respected roaster does not require me to like everything either. Both ideas need to survive at the same time.

5 Elephant, Berlin-Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

Maybe Specialty Coffee Is Global in the Wrong Way

There is an irony in specialty coffee. We place enormous value on origin and spend a great deal of time explaining why place matters. We want to know the farm, the producer, the cultivar, the altitude, the processing method, the soil, the climate and the decisions made before the coffee ever reaches a roastery. We tell consumers that coffee should express where it comes from and that its value is connected to the specific conditions that made that coffee possible.

And yet, while we celebrate difference in the coffee itself, the culture surrounding specialty coffee can sometimes move in the opposite direction. Across very different cities and countries, we increasingly encounter similar café aesthetics, menu language, equipment, roasting philosophies and even similar ideas about what a sophisticated coffee experience should look and taste like. There is nothing inherently wrong with influence traveling across borders. In fact, much of the progress in specialty coffee has happened precisely because knowledge, techniques and ideas have moved so quickly between producers, roasters, researchers, baristas and consumers. But there is a difference between sharing knowledge and creating uniformity.

A genuinely global specialty-coffee culture should not require every café to feel the same. Berlin should be allowed to feel like Berlin, just as Miami should feel like Miami. Addis Ababa should not need to resemble Copenhagen, and Tokyo should not need to reproduce Melbourne in order to be considered part of the same specialty-coffee conversation. The same should be true for the people who enter those spaces. A customer should not have to abandon their own cultural expectations, preferences or ways of relating to hospitality in order to participate in specialty coffee.

The internationalization of coffee has created something extraordinarily valuable. We now have access to knowledge, research, coffees, brewing techniques and professional conversations that would have been far more difficult to share a generation ago. But globalization becomes much less interesting when exchange begins to look like standardization.

Coffee itself gives us the strongest argument against that kind of uniformity. Its complexity exists because of difference. Genetics, Climates, Soils, Processing decisions, Roasting approaches. Brewing methods. All of these differ. Each stage adds another layer of interpretation, and that variation is part of what makes coffee worth exploring in the first place.

If we celebrate diversity in the seed, the farm, the process and the cup, then it seems contradictory to expect the people and cultures surrounding that coffee to become increasingly identical.

Perhaps the most interesting version of global specialty coffee is not one in which everyone learns to drink, roast, serve and experience coffee in the same way. Perhaps it is one in which we share knowledge internationally while still allowing place, culture and preference to remain visible.

Berlin, Germany, 2026. Picture property of María Esther Thome-López

What Germany Actually Taught Me

I did not leave Germany with a ranking of cafés. That would have been the least interesting result of the trip.

I left thinking much more about my own assumptions.

Five Elephant reminded me how powerful a human interaction can become in the memory of a coffee experience.

My first reaction at Bonanza was that stopping pour-over service approximately an hour before closing made no sense. If the café was still open, I wondered, why was one of its core coffee services no longer available? From the customer's side, it felt unreasonable. But later I started thinking about the decision differently. Perhaps the policy had very little to do with the customer and much more to do with the staff. Maybe ending pour-over service earlier allows the team to begin closing procedures, clean equipment properly and finish their workday at a reasonable time. I do not know whether that was Bonanza's reasoning, so I cannot present it as fact, but even considering the possibility changed the way I thought about the experience.

It made me realize that hospitality is not always a one-directional obligation from employee to customer. A café also has an obligation to the people working behind the bar. Sometimes what feels inconvenient or even inhospitable to one customer may be connected to a business decision intended to protect staff time, workload or working conditions. That does not mean the customer has to agree with the policy, but it does mean the policy may deserve more interpretation than an immediate judgment.

Ben Rahim made me confront the fact that culture shapes how we interpret service, while also reminding me that culture cannot automatically excuse an experience that leaves a customer feeling unwelcome.

The Barn made me examine where my own preferences sit within contemporary light-roasting philosophy.

Coffee Circle, which I experienced as somewhat more approachable, reminded me that even within one city there is no single Berlin interpretation of specialty coffee.

And the coffees themselves made me think again about something we teach but do not always practice: description is not preference, and preference is not universal truth.

Travel is useful because it removes the background against which our assumptions normally disappear.

At home, our expectations often feel so normal that we barely notice them. It is only when we move through a different culture that they become visible. Germany made me aware of how much I had brought with me without realizing it: my years in coffee, my sensory training, my roasting philosophy, my experience building and operating a café, my life in Miami, my Latin American background, and my own personal way of understanding hospitality and service.

I had gone there expecting to experience German specialty coffee, but the trip ended up showing me just as much about myself as it did about the cafés I visited. Every cup was being interpreted through a set of references I had built over years, and every interaction was being filtered through my own expectations of what good service, good extraction and a meaningful coffee experience should feel like.

That does not make those expectations wrong. It simply makes them mine.

And perhaps that is one of the most interesting things about a truly global coffee culture. Coffee can cross borders, but the way we value it is never completely detached from who we are. Taste travels, but it is shaped by memory, familiarity and culture. Hospitality travels too, but its language changes from place to place. Technical standards can become international, but the experience of quality remains partly human because people do not arrive at the cup as blank slates.

I do not think that is a weakness of specialty coffee. I think it may be one of its greatest strengths. A global industry does not have to produce a globally identical experience. In fact, the industry becomes more interesting when knowledge can move freely while culture, preference and place remain visible.

So, is specialty coffee really global?

In many ways, yes. The coffee travels. The knowledge travels. The standards travel. The people travel.

But the experience is always interpreted locally and personally.

Maybe the coffee is global. The experience never completely will be.

And perhaps it shouldn't be.

Thank you for reading me and please always remember....

"Because behind each cup of coffee there is much more than roasted beans."

Written by María Esther Thome-López

Co-Owner of Coffee Flock®

References

[1] Specialty Coffee Association. What Is Specialty Coffee? The SCA defines specialty coffee in terms of a coffee or coffee experience recognized for distinctive attributes that create significant value. (Specialty Coffee Association)

[2] Specialty Coffee Association. Coffee Value Assessment and SCA Coffee Value Assessment standards. The CVA framework separates descriptive, affective, physical and extrinsic forms of assessment, helping distinguish sensory description from impression of quality and other forms of value assessment. (Specialty Coffee Association)

[3] Bonanza Coffee Roasters. Official company information. Bonanza identifies itself as a pioneer of European specialty coffee in Berlin and dates its operation to 2006. (BONANZA COFFEE ROASTERS)

[4] Five Elephant. Official company information. Five Elephant describes its work sourcing and roasting specialty coffees in Berlin and traces its roasting operation to 2010. (Five Elephant.)

[5] Wang, Q. J., et al. (2019). The Role of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Sensory Factors in Sweetness Perception of Food and Beverages: A Review. The review discusses how expectation and extrinsic sensory cues can alter perception and evaluation of foods and beverages. (PubMed Central (PMC))

[6] Spence, C., et al. (2020). The Coffee Drinking Experience: Product Extrinsic Atmospheric Factors and Their Influence on Coffee Perception and Behaviour. Research examining how context and multisensory atmosphere contribute to the experience and perception of coffee. (ScienceDirect)

[7] The Barn Coffee Roasters. Official company materials describing its roasting philosophy in terms of light roasting, clarity, balance and expression of origin. (THE BARN Coffee Roasters)

[8] Sepúlveda, W. S., et al. (2016). Consumers' Preference for the Origin and Quality Attributes Associated with Production of Specialty Coffees: Results from a Cross-Cultural Study. Research examining differences in consumer valuation of specialty-coffee attributes across cultural contexts. (ScienceDirect)