ALEXEY NAGIBIN is an advanced specialty coffee expert with many years of professional experience in the specialty coffee industry. He founded one of the foremost Specialty Coffee Institutes, training Baristas from around the globe on the intricacies of Specialty Coffee. He owns and operates five high-end Collective Specialty Coffee cafes and is in the development of his plans - the USA.
He seeks to develop a culture and appreciation of high-end specialty coffee consumption worldwide, in addition to establishing self-regulating fair trade commodity exchanges working in unison to help further develop and enrich the growing industry according to and based on sustainability principles.
To increase the professionalism of the barista in 2020, he developed a new professional tool that allows a reflective assessment of the quality of coffee - Highline Sensory Coffee Code
Today with pleasure we are presenting it to the coffee community.
You can find the full version on the author’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Mr.Nagibin
What is Highline Sensory Skills?
In 2020, an expert in the world of specialty coffee developed and presented a new systematic approach to assessing the quality of coffee, for which he received the nickname “Robert Parker’s in the Coffee World”.
Thanks to Alexey Nagibin’s coffee assessment system, the level of industrial development in the field of quality assessment has become more systematic, structured, and objective,
We know that the world of wine has a long history and well-established traditions. People who understand wine professionally are called wine sommeliers. Upscale sommeliers can conduct expert evaluations. At the same time, the history of the specialty coffee industry is very young and counts for dozens of years. Thanks to enthusiastic young professionals and the absence of rigid frameworks, its development and popularity are growing rapidly!
For many years, baristas and Q-graders around the world used the wheel of flavors and aromas to describe a cup of coffee. With new ideas, it has undergone different changes, but conceptually it has remained similar - moving from the center to the edge, you can define the taste of coffee. It’s a simple barista tool that anyone can use to learn and understand the flavors of a beverage. People in different countries and regions of the world have different knowledge of flavors and may not understand some descriptors or interpret them based on their taste experience.
In pursuit of perfection and striving for objectivity not only in taste recognition but also in complex evaluation of coffee quality, Alexey Nagibin, coffee expert and developer of barista training programs, completed WSET courses for wine sommeliers. After many years of experience in the specialty coffee industry and having studied sommelier’s approaches, he developed a principally new systematic approach to coffee quality evaluation, which allows him to professionally determine the quality of the drink and make objective conclusions at the expert level!
Alexey studied the most familiar people’s tastes, aromas, and tactile sensations, which he put in the basis of the descriptive part. The new sensory algorithm has a clear linear structure for description from left to right and top to bottom, the result of which is an objective assessment! For two years, this method was tested at the Barista University World of Coffee Skills by more than 100 participants, including experts and beginners, and with 99% accuracy, all participants achieved the same opinion in the evaluation. This proves the high objectivity of the Highline Sensory Skills.
To leave space for discussion and creativity, as Alexey says, a scale with a range is used for evaluation, and the minimum quality rating, as is customary in the specialty coffee industry, starts at 80 points. Of course, such a grade requires taste experience in high-quality coffee of all categories, from champion to ordinary, but this is a personal decision. Perhaps in the world of specialty coffee appeared his own “Robert Parker”, but one thing is sure - the method provides a highly accurate assessment and allows you to understand the coffee market participants and to communicate in one language!
Let’s try by ourselves and Enjoy!
You can find Alexey on social networks
Instagram @nagibinalexey
LinkedIn Alexey Nagibin
Facebook Alexey Nagibin
