Who writes this, and how
I drink decaf every day, I am not a professional taster, and I buy nearly everything I write about here. That combination is worth knowing before you weigh any of it.
“Drinks both regular coffee and decaf, brews at home, not a professional taster. Every tasting note lists the recipe so you can calibrate against your own palate.”
This is positioning, not a disclaimer. Formal sensory training is in progress — SCA Sensory Skills Foundation, booked for October in Antwerp. That will change the vocabulary. It will not change the rules below.
No numeric scores. Ever.
A score implies a calibrated instrument behind it, and there isn’t one here. What you get instead is comparative language —sweeter than the Swiss Water Peru but shorter through the finish. Weaker than a number, more honest, and a claim you can actually check.
Sample policy, in short
- Every review states how the coffee was obtained — a required schema field.
- Sent coffee gets no copy approval, no preview, no promise of publication.
- No payment for coverage, in any direction.
- No affiliate links. Outbound links are untracked.
The method block
Every review carries the full brew protocol: brewer, grinder and setting, dose, ratio, water, temperature, roast date and tasting date. It renders on the page, not in an appendix. Notes from someone whose palate you don’t know are close to worthless unless you can see what they did.
Why every entry has a date
A directory rots quietly. Verification date is a required field, it renders on every entry, and anything past roughly eight months is flagged as needing a re-check. Where something couldn’t be confirmed — usually EU shipping — it says not confirmed rather than being filled in with a guess.
Corrections
Several claims that circulate widely didn’t survive checking, and this site says so rather than repeating them:
- “99.9% caffeine free” is one supplier’s guarantee, not a standard
- The “bready” character attributed to sugarcane EA has no source behind it
- The advice to grind decaf finer is contradicted by the only controlled study of it
- The EU’s 0.3% threshold governs instant coffee, not roasted beans
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The policy in full
Roasters send free coffee to people who review their category. Decaf is a category almost nobody reviews. So this will start happening, and the policy needs to exist before the first parcel arrives rather than being improvised in the moment.
- Every review states how the coffee was obtained — bought, sent by the roaster, or given by someone else. The disclosure sits above the tasting notes, not below them. It is a required field in the content schema, so there is no code path that publishes a review without it.
- Sent coffee gets no different treatment. No copy approval, no preview of the notes before publication, no agreement to publish at all. A sample that turns out to be dull gets written up as dull, or gets no review — never a soft one.
- No payment for coverage, in any direction. Nobody pays to appear in the directory and nobody can pay to be reviewed. There is no sponsored slot and there will not be one.
- No affiliate links. Outbound links go to the roaster, untracked. If a better option is somewhere else, the link goes somewhere else — including to competitors of anything this site might sell later.
Why comparative language beats a score
A score is a weaker claim than it looks and a comparison is a stronger one than it looks — because a comparison is checkable. If you have had one of the two coffees, you know roughly where the other sits. A number tells you nothing you can verify.
The same reasoning drives the method block. Consistency of protocol across reviews is what turns a pile of opinions into something comparable; with the protocol stated you can reproduce it, or at minimum discount it in a known direction.
Why the directory carries dates
Shipping policies change, roasters pause over packaging regulation, sites go down, subscriptions get retired. An entry that was right eighteen months ago and is wrong now is worse than no entry, because it looks exactly like a correct one. The freshness stamp is there so that rot is visible rather than silent.
Privacy
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