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Recent Reviews
Mele 100% Kona (92 points) from Hula Daddy is one of many impressive coffees recently reviewed that did not appear in a featured article.
McCafe vs. Starbucks
We sampled four different hot, espresso-based beverages from McDonald's and Starbucks to evaluate the quality behind the coffee marketing war.
Featured Coffee
Burundi Kinyovu (95 points) from Kaldi's Coffee Roasting is a complete expression of a Central Africa profile: balance, richness, complexly expressed acidity, silky body, pungently floral aromatics.
Burundi
Visit our extensive coffee reference section to learn more about Burundi and other Central African coffee origins.
Nominations
Nominate your favorite coffees for upcoming coffee cuppings.
Help: Sitemap
Our site map will help you find answers to many of your coffee-related questions.
Interview with Ken in Australian Magazine
Read an interview with Kenneth Davids in Crema, an Australian coffee magazine.
Tasting Super-Heroes
Ken's co-taster in May, Counter Culture's Byron Holcomb, comments on his recent experience tasting espressos.
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The world's largest coffee organization.
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Kenneth Davids
Editor & Writer
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The Coffee Review began cupping and publishing reviews in 1997. We pioneered the ground-breaking concept of 100-point coffee reviews, similar to those in the wine industry. Our goal is to entertain and educate coffee lovers, the coffee trade, and food service professionals with a credible coffee guide based on objective reviews from some of the most experienced individuals in the specialty coffee industry. Over the past decade, CoffeeReview.com has become one of the most respected and widely read coffee publications in the world.
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Animal-Processed Coffees: The Latest Contender
By Kenneth Davids | June 2009 |
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A favorite question asked by bored party-goers when meeting a coffee cupper for the first time runs like this: "Is it true that there is a coffee that is... uh... eaten by, and, uh ... " "Yes," we respond. "Kopi luwak. The coffee fruit is eaten by an animal and the coffee seeds are excreted (or depending on the crowd, a less Latinate term) collected, dried and sold as the world's most expensive coffee. The practice is particularly associated with Sumatra. The animal is a luwak, or civet cat, an omnivore a little bigger than a house cat but... |
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Alternative Africas: Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania
By Kenneth Davids; reviews by Jim Reynolds and Kenneth Davids | June 2009 |
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Coffees from the mountain ranges and plateaus that parallel the east coast of Africa are among the most distinctive in the world. The great coffees of Ethiopia and Kenya are by far the best known, but other African countries also produce distinguished Arabicas. For this month's article we review twelve coffees, six from Rwanda, four from Burundi, and two from Tanzania. Rwanda and Burundi essentially share a common topography in Central Africa. Despite stress from climate change, generally there could not be much better growing conditions for Coffea Arabica than here in the heart of Africa, where many growing... |
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McDonald's vs. Starbucks: A Milky Skirmish in the Coffee Wars
By Kenneth Davids with Ted Stachura | May 2009 |
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The latest front in what the business press likes to call the Coffee Wars is clearly more a battle about frothed milk, whipped cream and syrup than about coffee. McDonald's is rolling out its McCafé line of espresso-based (OK, milk-based) beverages with a national advertising assault of old-fashioned scale and intensity, while Starbucks, the Chain that Brought the Caffè Latte to Main Street (plus strip malls, high-rise lobbies, et al) has retaliated with full-page ads in the The New York Times, ads of the reasonable-sounding, text-heavy type that non-profit organizations run to set the record straight on political, social... |
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American Espresso Blends: Boutique and Bigger
By Kenneth Davids; reviews by Kenneth Davids and Byron Holcomb | May 2009 |
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Specialty espresso is currently in the throes of a creative explosion. I think of it as "post-Italian" espresso, a dynamic community of baristas, blender/roasters and motivated aficionados remaking espresso as a global connoisseur's beverage with passionately contested barista competitions, non-traditional brewing innovations, and freshly conceived blend designs.
The goal of this month's tasting reviews was to survey and celebrate some of the American espresso blends that are the fruit of this wave of innovation. Hence the term "boutique." However, once we started to receive the coffees - close to one hundred blends from forty different roasting companies - it became... |
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Papua New Guinea: Promise Only Partly Fulfilled
By Kenneth Davids; reviews by Jennifer Stone and Kenneth Davids | April 2009 |
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Three or four years ago I was looking out the window of a small airplane banking into a short (very short) grass airstrip serving a coffee-growing village of Papua New Guinea. Everything that makes the highlands of Papua New Guinea one of the most promising coffee growing regions in the world was spread out beneath me. Among all of the coffee terroirs of the world, the lush highland valleys of Papua New Guinea certainly must rank among the most Arabica-agreeable, with classically warm days and cool nights, ideal rainfall patterns, and deep, fertile soil. The people in the village,... |
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San Francisco Bay Area Coffees: Dark and Beyond
By Kenneth Davids; reviews by Kenneth Davids and Ted Stachura | March 2009 |
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Sorry, Seattle and all of those other places, but the American specialty coffee movement started in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course small artisan coffee roasting companies were long in business before Alfred Peet opened his famous Vine Street store in Berkeley in 1966. Small, roaster-in-the-back-of-the-store coffee companies surviving from the early part of the 20th century doubtless helped provide Alfred his model: Gillies Coffee in Brooklyn, Swing Coffee in Washington DC, and, above all, Freed, Teller & Freed in San Francisco, where Alfred apparently worked for a short period before starting his Vine Street shop. Nevertheless, the... |
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The rapidly increasing number of requests for objective reviews by Kenneth Davids and the Coffee Review is greater than our publication calendar can accomodate. Consequently, we now offer three ways to obtain coffee evaluations by Kenneth Davids.
More Information
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