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.
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, […]
The 2001 Panama Cupping Event
Most Panama specialty coffees are grown on medium-sized farms on the Pacific-facing slopes of 11,450-foot Volcan Baru, Panama’s highest point. Wrinkled by coffee-friendly valleys, Baru rises gently but massively at Panama’s western border with Costa Rica. Most of these farms are concentrated in the Boquete Valley on the southeastern side of the volcano. A few […]
Connect
Connect with us via social media