• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Coffee Review

The World's Leading Coffee Guide

Advanced Search

  • Reviews
    • Latest Reviews
    • Top-Rated (94+)
    • Espressos
    • Best Values
    • Top 30 Coffees of 2022
    • Taiwan Coffees – 台灣送評的咖啡豆
    • Pods and Capsules
    • Reviews by Country of Origin
    • Reviews by U.S. City
    • Green/Unroasted
    • Advanced Search
  • Reports
    • Latest Reports
    • Africa
    • Americas
    • Asia-Pacific
    • Espressos
    • Annual Top 30
    • Processing Method
    • Social/Environmental
    • Tree Variety
    • Blends
  • Equipment
    • Interpreting Equipment Ratings
  • Journal
    • Preview – 2023 Tasting Reports
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
    • How Coffee Review Works
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Kenneth Davids
    • Our Team
    • Our Advertisers
    • Our Sponsors
    • Learn
      • Interpreting Coffee Reviews
      • Reference
      • Glossary
    • Contact Us
  • Trade
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
    • Becoming an Advertiser
    • Campaign Package Deals
    • Getting Coffees Reviewed
    • Quoting Reviews
    • Award Certificates
    • 2023 Media Kit
  • 中文 – Chinese
    • 評介和獎章宣傳使用條款
    • 台灣送評的咖啡豆
    • 如何將您的咖啡送評
    • “行銷攻略” 促銷活動
  • Members
    • WHY BECOME A MEMBER?
    • Member Benefits
    • Our Sponsors
    • Programs and Initiatives
    • Member Support

Shop for top-rated coffees at Durango Coffee Company

Shop for No. 1 coffee of 2021 at Paradise Roasters

Shop for top-rated coffees at Amavida Coffee Roasters

Shop for Top-rated coffees at Barrington Coffee Roasters

Shop for top-rated coffees at Kakalove in Taiwan

Shop for top-rated coffees at GoCoffeeGo

Shop for 93-point Yemen coffee at Baba Java


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.

World Map - Emerging Origins

Emerging Origins

Let's start with origins that are already emerged, those that currently dominate American specialty coffee menu boards. There's Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain, for example. They are well emerged. The insiders' favorites, like Kenya, Ethiopia and Guatemala, may be struggling with low coffee prices, but they also are definitely emerged. Colombia and Costa Rica are established classics, and Papua New

March 4, 2004
Tasting Report | Reviews

Espressos of the Pacific Northwest

The Aficionado’s Pacific Northwest Espressos

If the Pacific Northwest has become identified with coffee generally, it has become even more identified with espresso. Though the espresso machine and its culture first romanced America via the Italian neighborhoods of New York and San Francisco, it only became fully Americanized in the Northwest in the 1980s. The basic Italian vocabulary of frothed milk, well-brewed espresso and a single dash of

February 16, 2004
Tasting Report | Reviews

Seattle's Pike Place

Pacific Northwest Coffees

It's difficult for a long-time Berkeley guy like me to admit that the Pacific Northwest is the heart of current North American coffee culture, but it is. Seattle, Portland, and small cities and towns around and between are paved with coffee houses, coffee stands, cafes and specialty roasters of every possible level of size and sophistication, far more numerous and more varied than elsewhere.

February 1, 2004
Tasting Report | Reviews

Espresso Capsules

At What Cost Convenience? Testing the New Single-Serve Coffee Systems

The idea sounds seductive: pop a single-serving package of ground coffee into a machine, press a button, and within a minute pull a fragrant cup of absolutely freshly brewed coffee out from under the spout. Because you brew a cup at a time and can select from an assortment of different little coffee packages, such a machine could (in theory) provide the coffee lover variety as well as freshness,

January 6, 2004
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Report: Coffees from Papua New Guinea, Timor and Java

Fragrance and Weight: Winter Coffees from the Pacific

The coffees reviewed this month all offer the sort of heartily complex cup that suggests fires, throws, and warm, rich kitchen recoveries from the elements (or, in warmer climates, recoveries from holiday traffic jams). And most originate on the gigantic islands of southeast Asia: Sumatra, Sulawesi (Celebes), Timor and New Guinea. They are an altogether rather exceptional group of coffees, all

December 5, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Black Gift Box with Gold Bow

Holiday Gift Coffees

Like wine, coffee makes a modest but immediately gratifying and reassuringly consumable gift for the holidays. However, those who drink coffee drink it daily, so a gift of coffee needs simultaneously to be familiar enough to please but special enough to warrant celebration. We came up with a variety of strategies for identifying what might be special enough for the holidays, ranging from

November 4, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tanzania Flag

The Tanzania Peaberry Mystery

Actually two intertwined mysteries - why peaberry, a grade of coffee that is potentially available from any coffee growing region in the world, is so firmly associated with a single origin - Tanzania - that it is 1) usually the only coffee available from Tanzania in specialty stores, and 2) often the only pure peaberry available from any country in specialty stores. It also turned out to be the

October 9, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Flag of Guatemala

Beyond Antigua: The “Other” Guatemalas

Some adjectives become so firmly stuck to coffee country names that they almost lose their meaning. Antigua and Guatemala may be such a combination, so familiar together that coffee drinkers either don't know that there are coffee-growing regions in Guatemala other than Antigua, or don't even know Antigua is a region, not just a mysterious coffee word that must mean something positive or people

September 8, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Not Your Ordinary Espressos

Common coffee wisdom argues that the only way to fully exploit the flavor-intensifying potential of the espresso brewing system is by brewing with blends. Because the espresso pressure-extraction brewing system is so efficient, the argument runs, it emphasizes the singularity and imbalance of single-origin coffees, turning their simple melodies into over-amplified cacophonies. Thus only a blend of

August 6, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Salvadoran Flag

The El Salvador and Honduras Adventure

For those coffee adventurers who take more pleasure in defining the unknown than in confirming the known, the coffees of El Salvador and Honduras offer intriguing opportunity. These two origins are the last of the six Spanish-speaking Central American countries to establish clear identities in the world of specialty coffee, yet both produce plenty of coffee, and, if this month's cupping is any

July 3, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Exterior of Supermarket

Pursuing Quality at the Supermarket

Suppose a coffee drinker knows that most coffee cans now lined up on North American supermarket shelves are rotten with poor quality coffees of the bland-at-best robusta species. And suppose that coffee drinker wants to move up to something better without excessive fuss or expense. In other words, simply add something handy and reasonably priced to the grocery cart. Are whole-bean coffees sold

June 2, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Coffee consumer surfing the web

Roasters without Stores

What a perfect niche, it would seem, for a small start-up Internet business: Take coffee orders by Internet or phone, custom-roast the coffees, and ship them the next day. Roasting to order would seem to make it possible for a company to deliver a much wider range of coffees than could be delivered by a bricks-and-mortar retailer, and deliver them fresher. This was the premise we attempted to

May 3, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Map of the Caribbean

A Snapshot from the Caribbean

Coffee reviews are necessarily more provisional than reviews of bottled beverages like wine. Not only is coffee subject to a much wider range of creative input, from grower and mill owner through roaster to the consumer who finally does the brewing, but the green coffee also changes through the crop year after it has been harvested and rested. I often describe a coffee review as a useful and

March 25, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Reports: Roasters' Choices

Roasters’ Choices

After having cupped excellent reader-nominated coffees for the last two issues of Coffee Review, I thought it might be a good idea to give the professionals who actually buy the green beans and roast them a shot at picking the coffees for a review, unhampered by the usual theme-oriented restrictions -- this month we are reviewing Guatemalas, this month breakfast blends, and on into the Coffee

February 28, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Coffee Review reader at desk

Readers’ Choices Round Two

Reviewed here are a dozen more coffees nominated by Coffee Review readers. As was true of the ten readers' nominations I reported on last month, the relatively high ratings for this group of coffees seem to support the notion that Coffee Review readers either have excellent taste in coffee, or, if you take a more cynical relativist position, tend to share my taste in coffee. The fifty or so

January 30, 2003
Tasting Report | Reviews

Readers’ Choices

What coffees do readers of Coffee Review actually drink, as oppose to read about? Are their tastes fairly similar to mine, or are they marching to some different coffee drummer? This review and next month's suggest some answers to those questions. Over the last few months readers have nominated close to two hundred coffees for review. Sometimes the reader simply delivered the name of the

December 22, 2002
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Report: Coffees from Papua New Guinea, Timor and Java

Sumatras

It is unlikely that anyone would put Sumatra up as the finest of the world's coffee origins, but many of us would select it as one of the most challenging and interesting. That challenge and interest is situated right in the cup, by the way. You don't need to glamorize traditional Sumatras with false travelogue romance. Not only does every lot of traditionally processed Sumatra taste different

November 26, 2002
Tasting Report | Reviews

Dark roasted coffee beans

Dark Roasts

Besides providing readers with some recommendations for fine dark-roast coffees, I set up this co-cupping with John Weaver of Peet's Coffee to find out whether the thin-bodied, burned dark roasts I so often taste from American roasters are my problem or the coffees' problem. By all measures, John Weaver ought to know about dark roasts. For the past 23 years he has been roast master of the

October 24, 2002
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Report: Ethiopia Coffees

Ethiopias and Kenyas

Ethiopia and Kenya are favorite origins for attacking coffee complacency. Think all coffees taste the same? Try a Kenya that tastes as though it were spiked by a fine cabernet, or an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe that tastes like lemon blossoms on a balmy evening. Arguments can be made that other coffee origins produce a more classic cup than Ethiopia or Kenya, but no other origins come close to either

September 24, 2002
Tasting Report | Reviews

Flag of India

India Coffees

Judges at the recent Fine Cup Award for India coffees experienced the jolt that has become usual at such competitions: Among the many excellent coffees that perfectly fulfilled their expectations of what a wet-processed India coffee should be -- low acid, sweet, mild, perhaps with just a hint of flowers -- two coffees broke through the stereotype completely, with powerful, complex, high- toned

August 18, 2002
Tasting Report | Reviews

  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 10
  • Go to page 11
  • Go to page 12
  • Go to page 13
  • Go to page 14
  • Go to page 15

Primary Sidebar

Shop for top-rated coffees at Durango Coffee Company

Shop for No. 1 coffee of 2021 at Paradise Roasters

Shop for top-rated coffees at Amavida Coffee Roasters

Shop for Top-rated coffees at Barrington Coffee Roasters

Shop for top-rated coffees at Kakalove in Taiwan

Shop for top-rated coffees at GoCoffeeGo

Shop for 93-point Yemen coffee at Baba Java

Become an advertiser

Get Coffees Reviewed

 

Connect with Us

Sign Up for Our Free E-Newsletter

Enter your email address below to receive our free e-mail newsletter
  • Coffee Reviews
  • Tasting Reports
  • Reference
  • Glossary
  • Please Support Our Advertisers
  • Contact Us
  • Journal
  • Kenneth Davids
  • Interpreting Coffee Reviews
  • Roast Definitions
  • Caveats about Coffee Ratings
  • Editorial Calendar
  • Getting Coffees Reviewed
  • Advertising Opportunities
  • Quoting Reviews
  • Copyright
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site Security

Copyright © 2023 Coffee Review. All Rights Reserved.