title_body: What are the guidelines for 'specialty' coffees?
upvoted_answer: There are not any firm guidelines established for what constitutes a specialty coffee.  Theoretically no one would consider anything made by Folgers to be a specialty coffee, and anything produced by a small local roaster should probably be considered specialty, but there is a lot of gray area in between.  For instance, some people may consider the bagged beans Starbucks sells to be specialty coffee, others (myself included) would not. Specialty is largely a marketing term like "Cloud" is for computing.  "Cloud" is used ambiguously for private, public, small, large, closed and open platforms.  
  
  Generally I would define specialty coffee as something not produced and sold on a national scale.  Most specialty coffees are not "branded" by a company because they are bought in lots and sold sort of "as is".  That is, the roaster bought X amount and when they sell through it, it is gone.  This is opposed to a larger company that will always have "Sumatra Special" available for sale.
  
  When you start talking about roasting with other things, or adding flavors, you have moved to "flavored" coffee, which I personally would never consider specialty coffee.  Oils and additional flavorings may be well liked by many people, but they can also be used to mask the shortcomings of less expensive beans and are generally used to produce a consistent tasting product.  
  
  Lastly when you start talking about growing conditions, it can vary, and doesn't necessarily mean anything.  You can have beans that come from the same lot differ widely even in processing.  There is no "perfect area" to grow coffee and good coffee can be grown in a fairly well defined, but still variable conditions.  Advertising that coffee was grown in a specific place doesn't mean it was properly grown, harvested, processed or roasted well.