- What you're gonna do is put it up. Just- - And spitting it out. - But just spit it out. - So bad. - You wanna do it in a way that if you did this with soup, your mother would smack you. - I am here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. But several floors up, there's a little known room where I got exclusive access and it's full of elite graders who grade the coffee that is part of the coffee commodity market. - It's very similar to wine tasting. - Rinse it around your tongue to pick up that sensory. - I'm not sure sensory can be taught.

I mean, some people just don't have the taste buds. - When did the grading room move here and are there any benefits or values to being here now? - So the grading room moved here about a year ago. It did about a 10 year hiatus in Midtown, but it has always been located downtown. Just showcase how our standards impact coffee pricing and how sort of the whole market works. We are the global benchmark.

- Hi, I'm Krystal. - Hi, Stacy. Nice to meet you, Krystal. - Nice to meet you. - Welcome to the ICE grading room. - Thank you. It's so early. Are you usually here this early? - I'm here early. We have an early start process. Usually I get here by 6:00 a.m. to set up for the graders coming in. They come in around 6:30, 7 for the first panels. So I have to get here to grind out all the coffee, set up the tables, get the water ready, and then we rock and roll with them.

- So how long has this job been around and how important is it? - When I started on the banking side in 1978, all of the coffee trading companies were located right here in the Wall Street area. We would walk from office to office with coffee samples and trade over a martini, or a hamburger or something along those lines. You had to learn the knack of throwing your tie over your shoulder so it didn't fall into the cup while you were cupping.

- What are we doing here? - So the first thing we do is we smell the coffee to see if there's any off odors. That shouldn't be. It smells clean. Then we spread it out to look for any sort of defects in the coffee, be they broken beans, or rocks, or sticks. 'cause it is an agricultural product. Then the most important part is the tasting of it. So let's go right over here to the table.

- Double fist it. - She keeps 'em going. - So guide me through how to do a tasting. - So when it's hot, we're gonna switch it back and forth. Bring it up to your nose, bring up the grinds right up to your nose. Now you're gonna take a little bit of the, in the bowl of your spoon. What you're gonna do is put it up, pull the air in, and then you're gonna extract it out. So this way your tongue is gonna be picking up whatever flavor is in the coffee itself.

Each one of these should have the same taste or origin flavors that we're looking for, depending on what we're cupping. If there's a defect, we'll tag it or the other graders will take it, and pick to see if they find the same thing. - So violent slurp then spit. - Yep. - Yes. - Okay. - [Terrance] Try to get as much air into it as you can. - Okay. - Now, what was your first feel of it when you brought it up into your mouth? - Well, my first thought was, I hope I don't choke. You know, I don't really drink coffee so it just taste like dish water to me.

How would you grade my slurp? - You did very good with the slurp. - Really? - For first time that was really, you did- - All right. - [Terrance] Working for the industry, you do practice this. Most of the green and roasters, cups, probably about 200 cups of coffee a day. The better the green, the better the quality is. - That one's brutal. - To make sure the coffee is high quality, some graders also visit the warehouses that store the beans. So when you grade one cup of coffee, how much coffee does that actually represent?

- That one cup of coffee represents 38,000 pounds. - [Krystal] Wow. - And when it passes at a higher rating, then the sellers can sell it for a really better and decent price. If it fails, it may not be sold at the high price that the importer bought it for, but at least he could sell it onto another roaster who could use it in some other lower grade productions. They'll use it more for a dark roast 'cause with dark roast coffee, sometimes you can hide the, you know, imperfections. - So this is a lot of coffee. How much is here and where does it all come from? - I would say there's approximately 30 million pounds of coffee in this warehouse alone.

There's coffee here from most of the producing countries throughout the world. A lot of coffee from Brazil, which is the biggest producer in the world. Columbia, Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia, East Africa, and in most cases coffee's sitting here for three or four months and then likely moving on to its roaster. - Is all the coffee that we see here, is it all used? Are there instances where you can't use it for whatever reason? - All the coffee has a use just at a different price point, depending on, you know, its quality and its ultimate, you know, consumer.

- So how important is what you do here to the global coffee market? - The coffee coming through our grading room anchors or connects the futures market to the physical market. It aligns the prices and keeps them credible. So, like, when you go to the store tomorrow, coffee price tends to stay the same, right. And also it allows for price discovery because the whole world knows what our standard is and what the price of coffee is. If I'm sitting in Columbia, or Kenya, or Brazil, I can price the coffee in front of me based on what our benchmark in New York is trading on, right.

There's a relative value there. Particularly in coffee and cocoa, we've had two years of really poor growing conditions. So stocks around the world are really low. So as coffee comes through our grading room, even a small change in our stocks can have a big impact on price because stocks are so low. - Out of all the commodities, why coffee? - When I was younger, if you were to have asked me, do you want to be a coffee trader, a commodity trader? I wouldn't even know what that was. But the coffee people had a vibe about them. It's a global commodity. And meeting all of these fantastic people and traveling to most exotic countries in the world where coffee's grown, it was really super appealing.

And once you're in, you never leave. I drink a lot of coffee every day. That's what keeps me going.