Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
Commodity coffee peaked in February 2025. Retail coffee in American supermarkets peaked in April 2026. That is a fourteen-month gap, and understand...
Read the setupCertification describes what a cooperative is allowed to sell, not what it manages to sell. Those are different things, and the gap between them is...
Read the setupThere are two kinds of claim on a bag of coffee. There are the ones designed to be read, which cost almost nothing to make, and there are the ones ...
Read the setupYou have almost certainly seen the number: half the land suitable for coffee will be gone by 2050. It appears in newspapers, on café chalkboards, i...
Read the setupFour labels compete for the same patch of a coffee bag, and they are not four versions of the same promise. One guarantees a price. One guarantees ...
Read the setupCertification is usually described in terms of what it pays: a minimum price, a premium, better access to buyers. It is much less often described i...
Read the setupThere is a claim moving around specialty coffee that a white cup makes the same coffee taste roughly twice as intense as a black one, and simultane...
Read the setupTwo species account for essentially all the coffee in the world: Coffea arabica, and Coffea canephora, which the trade calls robusta.
Read the setupEvery product page for a cup, mug, tumbler or flask claims the same virtue, in the same words: it keeps your coffee hot. It is the only property th...
Read the setupCrema is the most trusted quality signal in coffee and one of the least informative. Machines are marketed on it, beginners judge their progress by...
Read the setupThere is a step in almost every espresso recipe ever written that most people at home skip entirely, and it costs nothing, requires no equipment, a...
Read the setupA rosetta on the surface of a flat white is the most widely used proxy for café quality in the world. People choose where to buy coffee based on it...
Read the setup
