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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decaffeinated Coffees

The fact that I asked over fifteen roasters to send me decaffeinated coffees for review and only a handful actually did is one indication of how little interest roastmasters and coffee managers take in decaffeinated coffees. But it seems to me that the drinker of decaffeinated coffee deserves an even better cup than those of us who can fall back on raw stimulation to justify our

Costa Rica Coffees

Three issues weave their way through this report of my collaborative June cupping of Costa Rica coffees with leading coffee buyer and writer Kevin Knox. The first: Based on our limited sampling, what kind of coffee experience are this year's Costa Ricas likely to deliver to the consumer? The second: Is the cupper wearing his new clothes? How much agreement in language and taste can we expect

Current Crop Brazils

Brazil is coming up in the world of specialty coffee. It probably always was up in Europe, where Brazil's finest coffees, sweetly rounded and low in acidity, anchored the continent's leading blends. In the United States, however, Brazil was mainly known for producing vast volumes of cheap, mass-processed arabica coffees that found their nameless way into supermarket cans and bottles. Some

Espressos for Cappuccino and Caffe Latte

Espresso is the most demanding of all systems for brewing coffee. Not only does the slightest error in brewing doom the cup, but this system, which extracts the flavor elements of a serving of coffee in 15 to 20 intense seconds, exaggerates any flaw or imbalance in the coffee itself. So an espresso blend must be subtle and balanced. On the other hand, espresso coffee in the United States is

Brewing Espresso at Home

Coffee is a beverage that invites, even demands, obsession, and, of all coffee acts, brewing espresso can be the most obsessive. Two or three more seconds of dribbling out of the brewer can dramatically alter the cup, and the finest espresso coffee in the world can be utterly ruined by one or two careless gestures. Every time I publish a review of espresso coffees I receive emails, not about the

Roast-and-Ground and Whole-Bean Supermarket Coffees

At one time certainly when I wrote my first coffee book 25 years ago the distinction between commercial and specialty was clear. Commercial coffees came in branded cans at supermarkets and specialty coffees were whole beans sold in bulk at obscure stores in college towns with dark wood counters and burlap on the wall. Today, of course, that distinction is blurred. Many specialty roasters, large

Konas and Other Hawaiis

Kona coffee, grown on a narrow band of hard-scrabble lava terrain that meanders along the mountainside above the resort complexes and splendid western coastline of the Big Island of Hawaii, is a singular coffee origin in many respects. A combination of demand and scarcity have made one of the worlds most expensive coffees. It is a favorite among American and Japanese consumers, who associate it

Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras

When we travel the symbolic roads of specialty coffee south through Mexico and Central America, two origins straddle those roads like overachieving giants: Guatemala and Costa Rica. The other coffee origins of the region - Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama - make far less frequent appearances on specialty menus, although Mexico and Nicaragua in particular supply several