Journal

Readers occasionally call Coffee Review to task for rating coffees too high. (On the other hand, others ask why we've never rated a coffee higher than 97. That latter question I’ll save for another time and another blog.) But in response to those harboring the “too high” suspicion, the first thing I would point out is that in general we only publish reviews of coffees that exceed 87 or 88. That

If you’ve ever read a review on coffeereview.com, you’ve most likely noticed a pair of Agtron numbers listed below the attribute scores. Unless you work in the coffee industry, you probably don’t have a clear idea what these numbers represent. The inquisitive have undoubtedly copied and pasted the term Agtron into search engines to yield information about the Nevada based company of the same name

So let’s blog again like we did last summer. Reviewing three or four descriptive terms per week is the new plan. Judging by an occasional puzzled email, sweetness may be one of the more confusing terms for those new to coffee description. We use the term regularly in our reviews, and it’s one of the most important technical descriptors used in evaluating quality in green coffee. Yet readers

On the Island of Maui a unique cultivar called Mokka is commercially cultivated. I first heard of it perhaps a decade ago and over the years I have heard things like it is a varietal brought from Yemen or Ethiopia; always an air of mystique around its origins. While it’s a wonderfully romantic notion that it is some unknown cultivar from who knows where, the reality is that there is nothing

Pawel, in a recent response to my blog “Boomeranging to Super Light Roasts,” asks whether he should order his favorite coffee, a Sumatra Takengon Gayo Organic from the Aceh region, at “City+” or a somewhat darker “Full City.” He answers his own question, quite correctly I think, by writing that there is only one way to find out, and that is by trying both versions. But his response reminded me

Jamaica has long grown coffee, at one time, for a short while, it was one of the world’s largest producers of the crop. Much of the coffee comes from Jamaica’s famed Blue Mountains. Despite its reputation for quality I, like many coffee professionals, cannot remember a time in which it actually was great. I traveled to Jamaica recently to better understand the industry there and why the coffee is

Demand has been increasing faster than supply for a number of years now. This is a typical cycle after a disastrous and widely felt historic low. But it seems that this may not be an ordinary cycle and most producers may not be able to recover to meet the rising demand as new and powerful challenges emerge. I must admit that I came to World Coffee Conference really expecting a mind numbing

There are many unknowns in coffee. Regardless of how scientific some of us can make it sound, most of the brewing practices are a product of tradition, not science. At best, it’s practical observation, a very good first-step in scientific inquiry, but hardly definitive. Let’s take the agitation of grounds during brewing, sometimes called turbidity. One analogy expressed is that of a clothes