Admittedly, you have to be almost crazy to go up against the universal coffee marketing slogan ‘100 percent Arabica’ – but worse things have happened to me. When I set off this morning, there it was again – that message that is so false and yet so familiar: 100 percent Arabica quality. I stare at the paper cup of coffee that the young man next to me is holding on the platform and want to scream out loud. This automatism, which is at once trite, simple and probably therefore so popular, must be urgently questioned and then consistently eradicated.

First of all, quality (from Latin qualitas) simply means ‘characteristics’, which in the actual (Latin) sense cannot be wrong, because every product has certain characteristics. It is simply descriptive, without making any statement about the quality of the product – but that is how it is usually understood. And those who spread this message want it to be understood that way by the recipient. This is a deliberate miscommunication that is all too readily used as a universal Trojan horse in coffee marketing and self-indulgent pseudo-connoisseurship.

The background to this information is a ‘quality absolution’ for coffee, which is very useful for many roasters – at least in the short term. In the long term, taste will always prevail, and not every Arabica coffee is automatically a quality coffee.

No winemaker – nor any wine merchant or wine buyer – would ever think of using or accepting the type of wine alone, e.g. red wine, as sufficient evidence of good or high quality. So why is this possible with coffee? A wine bottle with a label saying ‘100 per cent red wine quality’ would certainly never find a buyer – except perhaps a consumer protection advocate.