Your next job as a Wall Street bean sniffer

For many people, drinking coffee is the thing you do to help you get through the workday. But for an elite team of lesser-known Wall Street workers, drinking coffee is the whole job.

The Intercontinental Exchange’s coffee graders are licensed professionals who drink, smell, and rate coffee for a living, to help determine the US futures-market prices for arabica beans, per The Wall Street Journal.

Sip happens…

… on the eighth floor of the New York Stock Exchange building, where 38 graders station themselves around tables covered in cups of brews and beans.

Using spoons, they race through evaluating them, sniffing, slurping, spitting (into spittoons) so loudly that they have to blast music to cover all the gross bodily noises.

Many graders have been on the job for decades and most are now in or approaching their golden years, meaning the team is in need of a fresh crop of pros. Which, on top of the volatility of the coffee market in recent years (due to tariffs, climate change, etc.), has become another pain point for the industry.

• According to WSJ, young people are opting for more glamorous finance work, like in private equity. But we imagine many of them probably just aren’t aware that “elite coffee taste-tester” is even a career option.
• Fortunately, this year has seen a high volume of applicants.

Ready for a career pivot?

Start studying up — as easy as it may sound, when your caffeine addiction directly influences a $250B global industry, sitting around drinking coffee becomes a tough job to score.

To qualify, you’ll need to pass a three-part exam that spans four days and has a pass rate of just 5%-8%.

• By comparison, the pass rate for the California bar exam, arguably the hardest in the country, was 55% last July. You might even have a slightly easier time becoming a Master Sommelier, the exam for which has a pass rate of ~10%.

It’s also offered just once every five years, with the latest one having taken place in April.

Plus, you’ll need at least five years of experience in the industry just to be considered for testing. And no — sadly, senior grader Stacy Moeller told WSJ, your stint as a barista does not count.