Coffee News
Coffee Review regularly publishes coffee tasting reports and 100-point wine-style coffee reviews as well as news and updates of interest to coffee lovers and our readers. News, updates, and blog posts below appear in reverse chronological order.
Tasting the New Crop of Single-Serve Coffee Systems
The idea, of course, sounds seductive enough: slip a little paper-covered pod or plastic pouch or capsule in a machine, press a button, and out comes a single serving of terrific, freshly-brewed coffee. No ground coffee on the counter, no arguments about whether to brew dark roast Kenya or decaf French Vanilla, no waste. A […]
Nice Going: Readers’ Choice Espressos
Coffee Review readers appear to have good taste in espressos. Of the fifteen espressos tested for this review, all were nominated by Coffee Review readers. Of those fifteen, seven achieved scores of 90 or over, and two more hovered in the 88/89 range. This success rate is considerably higher than typically achieved when I simply […]
Progressive Crema: Organic and Fair-Trade Espresso Blends
Here are three things you need to understand to fully appreciate the achievement embodied in the exceptional espresso blends reviewed this month: First, the espresso brewing system produces its best results from coffees that are balanced but complex. Typically, it takes a minimum of three different coffees, often as many as five, to produce an […]
Raising Coffee Consciousness: The Cup of Excellence and Green Coffee Competitions
Competitions in which international juries of coffee buyers and roasters gather to choose the best green coffees from the latest crop from a given country is not an entirely new idea, but in recent years it has taken on a new importance, bolstered by the capacity of the Internet to provide a medium for competitive […]
Fair Trade Amplifications and Corrections
Our last two review articles (Ethiopia and Kenya: The World’s Most Distinctive Coffees, October 2004, and The Fair-Trade Cup: Quality and Controversy, September 2004) contained three inaccuracies in regard to Fair-Trade coffees. In the September Fair-Trade article we wrote that in North America Fair-Trade-certified coffees are available from only three non-Latin-American origins: Sumatra, the Yirgacheffe/Sidamo […]
Daddy’s Socks or Fancy Cheese: Monsooned Coffees and the Perils of Evaluation
Some foods and beverages that are greatly valued by culture do not respond to the simpler expectations of gustatory pleasure. They offer quirky, ambiguous sensory experiences that typically appeal to those in the middle to late years of life. I still recall the moment, sometime in my early twenties, when I suddenly realized I enjoyed […]
Boutique Espressos
In the 60s we used to talk about instant karma, meaning one minute you’re criticizing someone’s taste in bellbottoms and the next you’re walking into the adjoining room and finding someone else knocking your flower-print shirt. My current episode of foot-in-the-mouth karma took a month, not quite instant, but definitely a quick turnaround from a […]
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 […]
Suggestions for First-time Visitors
An article about fine coffee appearing in the September issue of The Oprah Magazine recommends Coffee Review as a resource for those Oprah readers curious to learn more about the pleasures of what is probably the world’s most popular beverage. Many Coffee Review articles are aimed at passionate coffee aficionados and professionals, but those new […]
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 […]
Coffee Growers and the Farm-to-Consumer Shortcut
Doubtless many coffee growers and exporters watch with dismay and perhaps a sense of betrayal as green coffee prices fall to historical lows while retail coffee prices stay about the same. To be explicit, consumers are now paying only a little less now than they did a couple of years ago for roasted coffee, while […]
Snobs Vs. Altruists and the Coffee Price Crisis
Most readers of major newspapers know that a glut of cheap, poor quality coffee of the robusta species has triggered a worldwide coffee surplus, driving prices down to unprecedented low levels and plunging parts of the world dependent on coffee growing into economic and social crisis. Farm workers and peasant growers are being forced off […]
What Makes Sumatra Coffees Taste The Way They Do?
Coffee aficionados often assume that coffees from various origins taste different purely because they are grown in different climates and soils or produced by different botanical varieties of Coffea arabica. Obviously both assumptions are true. However, we often overlook the influence of how coffee beans are processed, or stripped of their fruit and dried. This […]
A Roast Master’s Perspective on Dark Roasts: John Weaver
When Ken asked me to do this tasting with him I agreed with some trepidation. I was afraid that my honest and unbiased opinion might be viewed as skewed because of my position as head roaster at Peet’s Coffee & Tea. However, my intention is to help. Everything involved with coffee is interesting to me, […]
Fun without the Buzz: Decaffeination Processes and Issues
Coffee is decaffeinated in its green state, before the delicate oils are developed through roasting. Hundreds of patents exist for decaffeination processes, but only a few are actually used. The trick, of course, is how to take out the caffeine without also removing the various components that give coffee its very complex flavor. Traditional or […]
On Matching Roast to Bean
Kevin Knox writes: In tasting through the Costa Rican samples for the June 2002 article Cupping with Ken Davids (and Kevin Knox): Costa Ricas, I was struck by the fact that while the samples represent a broad range of roasters, the range of roasts applied to the coffees was exceedingly narrow, ranging from moderately dark […]
A New Brazil Cup?
Not too long ago, Brazil coffees seldom made it onto American specialty menus. If they did they were identified rather generically as “Santos,” a term describing the higher grades of Brazil coffees, usually from the growing regions of Mogiana and Sul de Minas. The Santos cup, long a mainstay in better-quality blends in Europe and […]
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 […]
The Robusta Fuss
For those who just walked into the coffee movie, most of the coffee grown commercially in the world comes from trees of two species: arabica and robusta. Coffea arabica is the original commercial species of coffee, the one that Kaldi’s tiresomely celebrated goats ate, the species that first sold human beings on the pleasures of […]
Are Konas Worth It?
Or, to be more specific, is the actual coffee experience inside a Kona bag worth around $30 per pound, three to four times the price of the coffee experiences contained inside other bags? Most coffee professionals dont think so. Kona bashing is less prevalent in the specialty coffee industry than it was some years back, […]
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