Most green coffee you can buy comes with a country name and a flavor description. “Notes of chocolate and stone fruit.” That’s marketing copy, not data — it doesn’t tell you anything you can verify or roast against.

A real lot sheet does. Here’s what’s actually on one, and what each number means.

Moisture Content

Green coffee is a raw agricultural product, and moisture is the first thing that tells you whether it was processed and stored correctly. The accepted range for specialty-grade green coffee is 10-13%. Below that, the coffee is often over-dried and prone to roasting unevenly. Above it, you’re looking at a real risk of mold during storage and transit. A lot sheet without a moisture number is a lot sheet that’s hiding something — or one nobody bothered to measure.

Defect Count

Coffee is graded by counting physical defects in a sample. To qualify as specialty grade, a 350-gram sample has to have zero Category 1 defects — full blacks, full sours, pods, husks, large stones or sticks, mold damage — and no more than five Category 2 defects, the smaller flaws that affect cup quality without ruining it outright. This is a pass/fail line, not a taste opinion. A coffee either clears it or it doesn’t.

Screen Size (Grade)

This is a size classification, not a quality score — but it’s real and it matters for roasting consistency. Colombian coffee is graded by the size of screen (measured in 64ths of an inch) that retains the bean:

Supremo — retained by a screen 17 or larger (~6.75mm), the biggest grade in Colombian exports
Excelso — screen 15-16

Bigger isn’t automatically better-tasting. What it does affect is roast evenness — a bag with mixed bean sizes roasts unevenly, because smaller beans finish faster than larger ones in the same batch.

Process

Washed, honey, or natural — how the fruit was removed from the seed before drying. This changes the cup more than almost any other variable, and it should be stated plainly, not implied by a flavor description.

Altitude

Higher-grown coffee generally develops density and acidity differently than lower-grown coffee from the same variety. It’s a real, measurable input — not a marketing flourish.

Cupping Score

The Specialty Coffee Association’s 100-point scale is how the industry separates commodity coffee from specialty coffee, and specialty coffee from exceptional coffee:

Below 80 — commodity grade
80-84.99 — Very Good, entry-level specialty
85-89.99 — Excellent, where most single-origin programs live
90-100 — Outstanding, rare, mostly competition-lot territory

Roughly 5% of the world’s coffee production clears the specialty bar. Less than 1% breaks 90.

What This Means When You’re Buying

If a seller can’t hand you these six numbers for a specific lot, you’re buying a story, not a coffee. At Tostar Café, every field on a lot sheet is either a real, measured number or it’s marked as not available — never filled in with something plausible-sounding to make the listing look complete. See what’s currently available →