I haven’t however found a clear way to specify whether a place with (amenity=cafe + cuisine=coffee_shop) serves specialty coffee, while at the same time I can think of a large number of places that would fit those two tags, but not serve specialty coffee.
I believe specialty coffee deserves its own separate tag because:
It is a prominent, widely advertised feature of a coffee shop: Those serving specialty coffee very often have “specialty coffee” signage clearly visible, even from the outside.
It is a useful discriminator: Coffee enthusiasts (such as myself) will often want to find places by this feature specifically.
As for the shape of the tag, I’ve been thinking about the following:
speciality␣coffee=*: Seems too widely scoped. * Beer has both craft_beer= and drink:craft_beer, but the latter seems to be more widely used.
coffee:specialty=*
drink:specialty_coffee
drink:coffee=specialty: drink:* tags have served, takeaway, etc. as conventional values already, so this would overload the tag with a different value type.
drink:coffee:specialty=yes: In line with drink:coffee:decaf, which is currently * recommended in the wiki although it has * very small adoption.
To kick the tires with a concrete proposal, I suggest recommending for usage:
drink:coffee:specialty=yes
To align with drink:coffee:decaf. What are your thoughts on this?
Very much for this (because in general misusing keys as values is not a good thing), and as multi-value lists are already in use there is no conflict with other uses of the key.
I’m no so stoked about this option. The values for drink:* are well documented and seems a bit unergonomic to add a new “type of value” to the tag. It looks more like a suffix to me.
To take again the example of beer, we have drink:craft_beer instead of drink:beer=draught;craft.
That sounds good to me. For the subject of this post, drink:coffee:specialty=yes is what I suggest. So a cafe serving specialty coffee could look like:
I guess it’s a pity that drink:espresso and drink:filter_coffee are not drink:coffee:espresso and drink:coffee:filter, but I think that’s a separate discussion. For the purposes of this post, I think what we should discuss and somewhat agree on is whether we want to go on the double namespacing (drink:coffee:specialty), or the sneak case (drink:specialty_coffee) route.
As noted above, the correct spelling is “speciality”.
It is true that where American spelling differs from English, sometimes people in OSM add the American version (“jewelry” is an example); but if you search taginfo for “special” you’ll see that the top use of a spelling of speciality is indeed “speciality”.
I’m a bit unsure about this. “Specialty coffee”, with the american spelling for speciality, is coined as such by the Specialty Coffee Association, using such spelling. Wikipedia’s page for Speciality coffee (british spelling) redirects to the american spelling. I’ve personally, despite living in europe, never heard anyone use the british spelling in this context. With this being a very specific term, as opposed to just the word, I’d lean towards using the word the scene uses for this.
The value in the key tagging schemes are in general defective and actually work against ATYL as they make value discovery much much harder, not even touching on how they don’t scale.
If fine grained distinction between various fashions the drinks are available in is considered necessary why not
So I’ve managed to answer my own question, after chatting to a barista at my local coffee shop. He explained speciality coffee refers to the grade of the beans, and that some roasting brands only do speciality coffee. This got me thinking maybe it makes more sense to tag the grade and brand of the bean instead of using the drink: prefix?
I’m not keen on tagging grade or brand because that can change more or less easily. Some coffee shops “marry” a roaster (bean supplier) for a long time, but others switch between roasters as they see fit. Switching away from specialty coffee entirely is way more rare in my experience. SCA does have a ranking for beans, but that’s also even more volatile as it changes between batches of the same roaster.
Given “specialtyness” is more of a property of all the coffee-based drinks served there, using drink:coffee:, as a prefix is probably not the rigthest thingest to doest, but we have precedent for drink:coffee:decaf which is basically the same (orthogonal to specialty and the type of drink) and I don’t think it makes sense to have two different conventions for two very similar concepts.
I see what you mean about drink:coffee:decaf as it refers to the beans not a drink. Ideally we’d have a tagging system that is tied to the beans eg coffee:beans:decaf and coffee:beans:speciality.
