Every November, when we sit down to assemble the list of the most exciting coffees we’ve tasted throughout the year, we’re reminded that specialty coffee is a field defined by relentless curiosity. This year reaffirmed that truth. In late 2024, our team decided to expand Coffee Review’s Top 30 list to 50 coffees, with the goal of providing readers with a more nuanced window into our
Tasting Reports – Most Recent
Coffee Review has published more than 250 monthly coffee tasting reports since February 1997. The most recent tasting reports appear below in reverse chronological order. You may narrow your search by category from the main navigation drop-downs or by using the key word search feature that appears in the page header. The content in tasting reports and associated reviews was correct at the time of publication but may not remain accurate over time.
Top 50 Coffees of 2025: Countdown Begins November 16
Since 2013, Coffee Review editors have published an annual list of the year’s Top 30 Coffees, ranking the most exciting coffees from the thousands we cupped over the course of the year. This year, we're expanding from 30 to 50 coffees, so we can include more of the spectacular coffees that deserve to make the cut. We will rank the 50 most exciting coffees and espressos based on quality
Costa Rica Coffee 2025: How the World’s Most Disciplined Origin Keeps Raising the Bar
If there’s a coffee-producing country that has become the poster child for intentionality, it’s Costa Rica. Producers here have spent two decades doubling down on precision — processing, lot separation, traceability — while government policy has largely supported farmer incomes and pushed sustainability forward. Today, the result in the cup is a hedonic sensory spectrum, from crystalline washed
Tradition Meets Innovation: Mocha Java Coffee Blends
The backstory of the Mocha-Java blend is so memorable that it’s easy to become distracted by the story and overlook one of the main reasons roasters still produce Mocha-Java blends (and Coffee Review still writes about them): because the Mocha-Java concept seems to inspire original and exceptional coffees. The quality and distinction of this month’s top-rated coffees, all blends described by their
Tasting Non-Arabica Coffee Species: Robusta, Liberica, Excelsa
Coffee Review readers are doubtless aware of one of American specialty coffee’s most persistent taboos: Thou shalt not roast or sell coffee from trees of the Robusta species. For decades, the North American specialty coffee world has avoided having anything to do with the Robusta (Coffea canephora) species, the hardier, cheaper alternative to Coffea arabica that typically supplies around
Get Your Coffee Kicks on Route 66
10 of the best coffee roasters along America’s most famous highway Nearly 100 years ago, before the U.S. Interstate Highway system was born, Route 66 was established as a major transportation artery for both leisure travel and commercial transit. The route spanned 2,448 miles and meandered through eight states: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
How Do Six Top National Specialty Coffee Brands Stack Up?
If you’re a coffee drinker, you’re familiar with the coffees on every supermarket shelf, the ubiquitous bags you either look for or avoid, depending on your relationship to the many corporate brands available. A growing number of nationally available specialty coffee brands in the U.S. are on store shelves from Boston to Baton Rouge and Boise to Berkeley. And if you live in a small, rural town
2025 Tasting Reports in Preview
Coffee Review’s tasting reports aim to answer coffee questions that can only be answered by tasting the coffees that pose the questions. Usually, this means blind-tasting a whole lot of coffees — 50 to 100 per article — and reporting honestly on what we find, including calling attention to the finest of these coffees with reviews and ratings. In 2025, we plan five such tasting
A Deeper Look at the Top 30 Coffees of 2024
In 2024, Coffee Review blind-tasted over 3,000 coffee samples from hundreds of leading roasting companies and coffee producers around the world. Over the course of the year, we published more than 600 reviews on CoffeeReview.com. The Top 30 Coffees of 2024 list is our editors’ ranking of the 30 most exciting of these coffees, representing roughly 1 percent of the samples we cupped and 5 percent
Guatemala Coffees 2024: Classic with a Geisha Boost
There was a lot of soulful, old-fashioned coffee pleasure to be had among the 38 single-origin Guatemala coffees we tested for this month’s report, along with a few subtle sensory shocks and surprises. Given the waves of experimentation with processing methods pursued by Central American coffee producers over the last couple of years, I thought we might need to finesse our way through trade-offs
Should Serious Coffee Lovers Care About Celebrity-Branded Coffees?
Our notions of celebrity in the U.S. have expanded over the decades. Being a Hollywood icon is no longer the only gateway to stardom, as evidenced by the growing pool of “influencers” from many walks of life. From YouTube trendsetters to musicians powerful enough to tip various political scales, the minimum basic requirements are a smartphone, a bit of charisma and an audience. Many household
Convenience vs. Quality in Ready-to-Drink Black Coffee
Summer is upon us, and that means one thing for many coffee lovers: cold coffee. It sounds like such a simple beverage, but the number of brew methods and packaging technologies currently on the market, many of them proprietary, make choosing a ready-to-drink (RTD) coffee confusing. We decided to cut a path through the complicated landscape of RTD products in hopes of getting some
Single-Origin Espressos: Anaerobics Crash the Party
What is a single-origin espresso? Very generally defined, it’s an espresso produced from a single crop of coffee grown and processed in a single country, region, cooperative or farm. In other words, it is not a blend of coffees grown in different places or at different times. Single-origin (S.O.) espressos allow an espresso drinker to explore the wider world of coffee in the same mindful,
Hawaiʻi Coffee Roasters’ Unique Place in the Global Coffee Scene
When most of us think of Hawaiʻi, we think of perfect beaches, iconic sunsets and unparalleled relaxation. When coffee lovers think of Hawaiʻi, “Kona” is often the first word that comes to mind. But while the Hawaiian Islands are, indeed, a paradise, they’re also a place where coffee is a critical part of the economy — an economy that’s been hammered over the past few years by the
2024: Coffee Review’s Year in Preview
Every year in December, Coffee Review’s editorial team hustles to choose the topics for the following year’s editorial calendar. This, our January report, shares some thoughts on the topics we chose and how we chose them. See our full 2024 Editorial Calendar. In November, as Coffee Review compiles its annual Top 30 Coffees list, we carefully consider the factors that made the coffees we tasted
A Deeper Look at Coffee Review’s Top 30 Coffees of 2023
In 2023, Coffee Review blind-tasted more than 3,000 coffee samples from hundreds of leading roasting companies and coffee producers around the world. We ultimately published nearly 600 reviews on CoffeeReview.com over the course of the year. The Top 30 Coffees of 2023 is our editors’ ranking of the 30 most exciting of these coffees, representing roughly 5 percent of the coffees we
Fruit- and Spice-Fermented Coffees: The Cup and the Controversy
At the experimental tip of the specialty coffee world, the excitement never stops. The latest processing twist from Colombian and Central American coffee growers involves putting natural fruit, herbs or spices into the fermentation tank with the coffee during processing. The fermentation tanks are usually sealed, making this fermentation anaerobic as well. Readers of our March 2023 report know
New Coffee Varieties: Sidra, Chiroso, Pink Bourbon, Wush Wush
I’ll start with a familiar story. Around 2004, a Panama coffee farmer, Price Peterson, found a field of coffee trees growing on his property that was different in appearance from other trees. He entered the coffee from those trees as a separate lot in the 2004 Best of Panama green coffee competition, and that coffee, competing as the “Geisha” variety of Arabica, blew away that year’s competition,
The Evolution of “Fair Trade” Coffee
Although the term “fair trade” has been in use for over 75 years, it is not linked to one specific group or organization. Conceptually, fair trade is a global movement that includes producers, consumers, various nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses; it is a system designed to build a more equitable trading model for a range of products, including coffee. In 1973,
Ten Coffees From Women Producers That Should Be On Your Radar
When we last visited the subject of women coffee farmers for a tasting report in 2017, we explored the landscape of gender (in)equity through the lens of roasters who had purchased coffees produced by women — as farm owners, farmers in the field, as part of cooperatives, and as collectives pulled together by intention or by fate. It is still the case that, while women own between 20 and 30 percent
