While the sun is finally peeking through the clouds in our home base of Berkeley, California, much of the U.S. is still blanketed in snow. If you’re trying to dig out of your driveway to go to work, that’s a bummer, but if you’re getting ready to hit the slopes, you’re in your happy place. Either way, you’re going to need coffee, and we’ve found 10 ski country coffees to recommend you get your
Classic Origins, Mission-Driven Companies: 9 Roasters New to Coffee Review
Our monthly reports are a bit like a coffee grab bag — we never know what kinds of submissions we’re going to receive, but we always get some surprises that steer the month’s given theme in specific directions. And that’s really the point with our reports: to pose a question and see what potential answers surface. The end result is never comprehensive, but it’s always engaging and
Mexico Coffee: Processing Innovation, Cooperatives, and the Tradition of Collaboration
While Mexico is somewhat under the radar when compared to more popular coffee origins, the country has been producing coffee since the late 18th century, and given recent developments, may well be poised to become a model for coffee production in the 21st century. In this month’s report, we review nine exceptional coffees from four different Mexican growing regions. Coffee farmers
Sticking with the Classic: 8 Coffees from Southern California Roasters
The ever-evolving world of specialty coffee continues to see rapid growth in the area of product differentiation, with a strong emphasis on processing innovation at the farm level. In the last decade or so, as the story of each individual coffee has become more important to the consumer, it is variation in processing method that seems to get the most attention. Perhaps that’s because
Fruit Bombs Are the Point: Natural-Processed Espressos Defy Convention
The Coffee Review lab has smelled like a candy store for the last few weeks — a Willy Wonka factory for grownups. Of the hundreds of coffees we cup every year, a growing percentage of them are natural-processed. In the wine world, the word “natural” doesn’t mean anything in particular, is more of a marketing term designed to imply minimal intervention in the winemaking process. In coffee,
Darker-Roasted Coffees: Not Just Old-School Anymore
Every few years, we at Coffee Review like to survey the dark roast landscape. Dark-roasted coffee is a daily staple for some coffee drinkers and anathema to others. But there appears to be a sweet spot that appeals to a wide range of coffee-drinking styles that’s not too light and not too dark, making equal space for those who drink their coffee black and those who doctor
Reflections on the Art of Coffee Blending: Daily Drinkers With Personality
The idea of the coffee blend is a long and winding road. Blends give roasters an opportunity to create a coffee that evokes specific sensory properties, and blends are often designed to give consumers a consistent experience over time (much like a Champagne house approaches the non-vintage brut). But before consumers began insisting upon knowing the origins of what’s in their cup, it wasn’t all
Our Love Affair with Geisha — It’s Not Just a Panama Thing Anymore
The Geisha variety of Arabica is the most expensive green coffee in the world. Year after year, this sought-after variety — known for (in the hands of a good roaster) its florality, delicate fruit, integrated structure and balance — breaks new price records in the Best of Panama auction. The Panama with the highest price in 2021 was a Geisha that sold for $2,568.00 — per pound. It’s gotten
Tradition, Diversity & Measured Innovation Elevate Guatemala Coffees
While some people in the specialty coffee industry still refer to the “classic Central America cup,” effectively lumping together the diverse coffee-producing countries of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, it is more the trend now to make increasingly fine distinctions among these origins in terms of varieties, processing, and cup profiles specific to each. Single-origin
Darker-Roasted Espresso Blends: Variations On A Classic Theme
Each year, the Coffee Review team publishes an espresso report, for which we invite roasters to submit coffees on a specific theme. In typical years, we partner with an independent lab or roaster here in the San Francisco Bay Area and taste the espressos with at least one outside cupper and a barista or two dialing in and pulling shot after shot. But this year is certainly not typical. The
Cold Black Coffee: Simplicity Rules the Post-Pandemic RTD Landscape
While so much in the world of coffee gets “curiouser and curiouser” each year, to echo the protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — from increasingly complex, mysteriously named green coffee processing methods to new hybrid varieties of Arabica born of necessity to respond to climate change — specialty coffee is a living entity, its success defined by an ability to adapt, both to
Spring Break In a Cup: Finding Great Coffee Roasters In Coastal Communities
Every year, Coffee Review organizes a report focusing on roasting companies from various regions of the U.S.: in 2018, the Mountain States, in 2019, New England, and in 2020, the Northwest. Given that it’s been a difficult winter, to say the least, this month's report celebrates coffees roasted in U.S. coastal communities, particularly beach towns and tourist destinations. We put out our general
Coffee as a Force for Good: Roasters Who Give Back
Like everything bought and sold, coffee can be a vehicle for profit or a tool for changing the world. Sometimes, it is both. 2020 was, unequivocally, a difficult year for the coffee industry, globally speaking, as it was for many of us working in that industry. One response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is to help others make it through the storm. Our report this month
The Joy of Kenya, Classic Coffee-Producing Origin
What makes a coffee taste like it does? Many factors go into what you ultimately experience in your morning cup. First, there’s the tree variety that produces the coffee. For specialty coffees, the varieties in question are, with rare exceptions, of the Arabica species, and there are hundreds of possibilities. Then, there’s the place in which the tree is grown — the coffee’s terroir. (There is
RTD Rising: Single-Origin Cold Coffees Elevate the Game
It was only two years ago that Coffee Review last explored the landscape of cold black coffees offered in ready-to-drink (RTD) format. In the 2018 report, we celebrated some excellent samples, but the majority of the submissions were produced from blends of various anonymous green coffees, as opposed to single-origin coffees from identifiable farms, mills or cooperatives, the kinds of coffees
Desert-Island Coffees: What To Drink When You’re Stuck at Home
For most of the world, the first months of 2020 have been a challenging season, with millions across the globe either anticipating, in the throes of, or rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic. For the past two months, Berkeley, California, where Coffee Review is based, has been under a statewide shelter-in-place order. Whether we’re too busy or not busy enough, we’ve all had time at home to
Coffee Roasters of the Northwestern U.S.: Classic Coffees, Resilient Communities
Each year we spotlight local roasters in the U.S. specifically by regional geography, choosing one region of the country to look at in depth. This year, we invited roasters from the Northwest states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to submit coffees for a blind cupping, and we report here on the nine top-scoring entries. In many ways, the Northwestern U.S. was the birthplace of
Single-Origin Coffees in Supermarkets
We track the specialty coffee industry obsessively, day in and day out, documenting its latest trends toward bespoke experiences (both at cafés and at home) and celebrating the farmers and roasters who are pushing the envelope of coffee experimentation and differentiation in unprecedented ways. But what options are available to coffee-lovers who don’t have the time or inclination to order
2019 Holiday Coffees: Celebratory Blends That Elevate the Ordinary
Every December, we look at some aspect of the vast array of holiday coffees on offer from roasters around the world. This year, we focus on blends — specifically, holiday-themed blends, as interpreted by roasters and available only during the holiday season (roughly November to February). Creating exciting holiday blends has become something of a year-end competition among good specialty roasters
Idealism and Achievement: 8 New North American Roasting Companies
Opening a new coffee roastery today seems like a daunting idea. There's the increasingly troubled U.S. economy, but even more alarming is the unprecedented turmoil in the global coffee industry, which includes insultingly low prices paid to farmers, infrastructure challenges, and climate change, which has virtually wiped out some regional coffee industries, put many more under extreme stress, and
