By now, most readers of Coffee Review are familiar with the win-win-hypothesis of specialty coffee: If consumers pay more for better coffee from dedicated producers, and if some of the high prices paid by consumers make it back to those producers, they will be encouraged to generate even better coffees, which will please even more consumers, who will gratefully continue to pay higher prices, and
Fun With Ferment: Anaerobically Processed Coffees
In early April, some rather odd-smelling packages began arriving at the Coffee Review lab. Describing the collective aromas that wafted from them is difficult. And describing those aromas continued to be difficult once we started actually tasting the coffees inside the packages. Certainly, there was lots of fruit and chocolate. And fragrant cut cedar, and sweet flowers. But along with these more
Colombia Coffee 2021: Best of Both Worlds or Identity Crisis?
Colombia could be approaching best-of-both-worlds status as coffee producer. On one hand, standard commodity Colombias continue rolling down to the ports and onward into “100% Colombian” supermarket cans and jars, whose quite decent contents put to shame the bland, woody, Robusta-laden contents of competing supermarket cans and jars. At the same time, small lots of specialty Colombia
The Fate of a Classic: Washed Central America Coffees
For decades, the classic washed or wet-processed coffees of Central America and Mexico have constituted one of the world’s great go-to coffee types. Usually clean-tasting, usually sweetly-tart, with a shifting array of fruit notes – always stone fruit, typically some citrus and flowers, always notes ranging from nut and caramel to full-on dark chocolate depending on the coffee and roast. And most
