The challenge: The highest quality coffee is produced by large, technically sophisticated companies which do a much better job at delivering fresh, consistent, good-value coffees than do most of today’s smaller specialty roasting companies.

Neither size nor technical sophistication assures quality. Only the obsessive and unrelenting commitment of a company’s Read the rest of this entry »

The Challenge: Coffee buyers for roasting companies should be doing much less travel and much more cupping, quality control and customer education.

Kenneth Davids writes:

I guess my reservation with the challenge statement is the repetition of the “much” word. If the thrust of the challenge statement is to argue Read the rest of this entry »

The Challenge: The latest roaster emphasis on offering high-priced microlots without also offering a core lineup of good-tasting origin coffees at decent prices is a disservice to consumers.

Kenneth Davids writes:

I like “micro-lots,” if what is meant by that term are coffees that 1) are small, distinctive lots that Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I took a few steps across a relatively new frontier of coffee connoisseurship known generally as “pairing,” i.e. recommending certain coffees that best pair with certain foods. Although I’ve always found the pairing process interesting, I’ve never pursued it in any depth. But when I was Read the rest of this entry »

Flowers and aromatic wood situate at opposite ends of the sensory range for coffee, though they both are among the most common and attractive of aroma and flavor notes.

Floral notes appear to be a direct expression of the floral tendencies of the coffee fruit and seed; at times they Read the rest of this entry »

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, Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

It occurred to me again as we were cupping five beautiful single-origin samples from two of the leading new-paradigm roasting companies (call them third wave , fourth wave – whatever wave we’re on now) that some of these exciting, ground-breaking roasting companies may be edging toward, well, too light a Read the rest of this entry »

As part of a just completed trip to Kenya, I visited some farms and coops in the classic Kenya growing regions northeast of Nairobi. Before arriving at the coffee, however, we enjoyed a day’s run past giraffes, rhinos and other impossible creatures around Lake Nakuru, a lake particularly famous for Read the rest of this entry »