A Kansas City coffee roaster has attained a prestigious certification for quality.

After six days of rigorous classes, presentations and more than 20 exams, Parisi Artisan Coffee’s Head Roaster Jonathan Rodick received one of the highest industry honors when he was awarded the Q Grader Accreditation from the Coffee Quality Institute last month. Rodick is one of about 4,400 Q Graders worldwide.

“I can take what I learned through the Q Grader program to know exactly what I’m tasting and ensure that the Parisi Coffee we’re roasting is the best quality it can be,” Rodick said.

Parisi began roasting coffee in Kansas City in 2006 and was started by a local Italian family who had established several successful artisan food companies under the parent company, Paris Brothers Inc. Parisi coffees are small-batch and drum-roasted at the company’s Kansas City production facility near Southwest Boulevard.

The Q Grader Accreditation Program was established in 2004 as a method of standardizing coffee quality grading. The system quantifies taste attributes such as acidity, body, flavor, aftertaste, uniformity, balance and sweetness to ensure all “graders” are identifying flavor characteristics consistently.

By using the Q system, coffee buyers can communicate quality through the coffee supply chain from the farmer to the exporter to the roaster. By applying a score to a coffee, everyone involved in the process understands the quality of that coffee.

The course lasts six days and combines classes, lectures and presentations with a set of 22 exams – all of which must be passed in three days to become an accredited Q Grader. The course must take place in a lab that has been approved by the SCAA with a certified instructor.

“It is a grueling experience both physically and mentally because it demands so much of your senses,” Rodick said. “As part of the test, we were asked to make decisions calmly and quickly based on the expertise of our taste buds.”

Rodick has worked at Parisi for the past two years. His passion for coffee began when he started in the business as an apprentice for PT’s Coffee in Topeka. He also worked on a rural coffee farm in Colombia for two years.

As head roaster, Rodick is responsible for Parisi’s customer and employee coffee education programs, as well as assessing and validating the quality of all Parisi products.