Specialty Coffee Wiki

Coffee Review

Properties3
descriptionThe Berkeley review publication that has been scoring coffees out of 100 since 1997 — where the 100-point coffee score most drinkers recognise came from, who does the tasting, and the $375 submission fee a reader should know about before quoting a score.
tagsorganization, media, scoring, sensory, industry
aliasesCoffeeReview.com, coffeereview.com, Coffee Review Top 30, The World's Leading Coffee Guide, organizations/coffee-review

10 min read

Coffee Review

Coffee Review is an American online publication that tastes coffees and publishes a score out of 100 for each one, along with a written tasting note. It launched in 1997, calls itself “The World’s Leading Coffee Guide,” and works out of a cupping lab in Berkeley, California.123

It is the reason a bag of coffee in a shop can carry a number on it. Wine had been scored out of 100 for years; Coffee Review says it “introduced the first-ever 100-point, wine-style coffee reviews to the specialty coffee industry.”1 Whatever the exact precedence (see the warning below), the format stuck — a three-figure score is now the shorthand the whole trade uses to say this coffee is good.

Two things are worth getting straight before you read a Coffee Review number, and both are covered further down: it is a critic’s verdict, not an auction price or a competition placing, and roasters can pay to have a coffee put in front of the cuppers.

What it is

Launched1997
Co-foundersKenneth Davids (Editor-in-Chief) and Ron Walters3
BaseBerkeley, California, USA3
Scale50–100 points, plus five attributes scored 1–104
OutputIndividual coffee reviews, monthly tasting reports, annual Top 30 list
Volume claimedReviews of “thousands of coffees,” “tens of thousands more” tasted, and “more than 250 in-depth monthly reports”5
Sitecoffeereview.com

Coffee Review is a publication, not a governing body. It sets no standards, licenses nobody, and runs no auctions — unlike the Specialty Coffee Association, the Coffee Quality Institute, or the organisers behind Cup of Excellence and Best of Panama. In the map drawn by Coffee media, it sits alongside Sprudge, Perfect Daily Grind and Roast magazine as trade press — except that its main product is a number rather than an article.

Who does the tasting

The masthead is small — four people.3

NameRole
Kenneth DavidsEditor-in-Chief, co-founder
Ron WaltersCo-founder; business operations, marketing and social media
Kim WestermanCo-Owner and Managing Editor; Senior Editor and Lead Reviewer, Q Grader certified
Jason SarleyAssociate Editor and Co-Cupper, Q Grader licensed, Roasters Guild roasting certification

Kenneth Davids has been in coffee since the early 1970s, is Professor Emeritus of Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and received a Special Achievement Award from the Specialty Coffee Association in 1996 — the year before the site launched.3 Ron Walters is credited on the same page with having “conceived of and helped pioneer the development of 100-point reviews in the specialty coffee industry” in 1996.3

How the scoring works

Coffee Review’s published scale runs 50 to 100, and the bands are named.4

ScoreCoffee Review’s word for it
195–100Exceptional
290–94Very Good to Outstanding
385–89Good
480–84Fair
5Below 80Poor

Underneath the headline number, five attributes are each rated 1–10, for intensity and quality together.4

  • Aroma — how strong and how pleasant the smell is, and what it hints at.
  • Acidity — “the bright, dry sensation that enlivens the taste of coffee,” without tipping into sourness.
  • Body — the weight and texture in the mouth, light through heavy.
  • Flavor — the balance of sweet, bitter and sour, plus the specific fruit, floral and wood notes.
  • Aftertaste — what lingers after you swallow; ideally sweet rather than bitter.

This is close to, but not the same as, the SCA cupping protocol form used by Q Graders and by Cup of Excellence. The most visible difference is the starting point: the SCA-style form effectively begins at 80 for anything worth calling specialty, while Coffee Review’s bands run down to 50 and label 80–84 “Fair.” A Coffee Review 85 and a competition 85 are not automatically the same statement. See Coffee scoring for what a point on a 100-point scale actually represents, and Coffee Value Assessment for the SCA’s move away from a single number altogether.

The part that matters most: roasters pay

Coffee Review publishes its price list, and any reader quoting a score should know it exists.6

RouteCost to the roaster
Scheduled tasting reports (the monthly themed round-ups)No charge
Standalone roasted coffee review375 per sample**; **225 non-espresso / $275 espresso for advertisers
Private evaluation (roasted or green, not published)$375 per sample
Green coffee review$375 per sample

Samples must be at least 12 ounces for non-espresso, 16 ounces for espresso, and 400 grams for green coffee.6

The safeguards Coffee Review states are these: standalone submissions are cupped using “the same tasting procedures and scoring methods” as everything else and are evaluated “objectively on a blind basis”; a paying roaster “will” get their coffee reviewed, but is “not assured of a favorable result”; and “it remains the sole discretion of Coffee Review whether it will publish a review.”6

Read plainly: money buys a place at the cupping table, not a score. But the last clause — publication is discretionary — means the published record is not a random sample of the market. A roaster who pays $375 and gets a disappointing result may simply never see it appear. That is a survivorship effect worth holding in mind when you notice how few low scores are on the site, and it is the single most important caveat on this note.

The free route is the monthly tasting report, where Coffee Review chooses the theme and solicits the coffees itself. Those are the reviews with the least commercial pull on them.

How it shows up in the trade

A Coffee Review score travels. This wiki alone records several places where the number, not the tasting note, became the marketing:

  • Finca La Mula, Willem Boot’s Geisha farm in Panama, produced the coffee that JBC Coffee Roasters sold as Coffee Review’s number one coffee of 2015 at 97 points — at 59.95 for eight ounces, roughly 120 a pound roasted.
  • Pebble Coffee of Taipei is documented here largely through a Coffee Review entry: a Tanzania Shiwanda Estate Peaberry at 91 points in May 2014, which is also the source for the roaster’s own location.
  • Dragonfly Coffee Roasters appears here with published Agtron 50/60 roast-colour figures taken from a Coffee Review entry.
  • Coffee Review’s origin reference pages are cited on Papua New Guinea as the most detailed public sensory description of that country’s coffee.

The annual Top 30 is the list that gets picked up hardest. It is an editorial ranking of the year’s highest-scoring reviews, and a roaster who lands on it will say so for years.

What a Coffee Review score is not: it is not a price discovered by bidders at a green-coffee auction, and it is not a placing awarded by a jury at Best of Panama or Cup of Excellence. A 97 there means a small panel liked a coffee enormously. It says nothing about what anyone paid for it, and it does not put the coffee in any competition’s record book.

To verify

“The first in the world to apply 100-point ratings to coffees.” This is Coffee Review’s own claim about itself, made by co-founder Kenneth Davids in the publication’s 25th-year retrospective — “We were the first in the world to apply 100-point ratings to coffees (in 1997)” — and echoed on its about page.51 No independent source corroborating the precedence was found. Treat it as a self-claimed distinction, not a settled historical fact. There is also a small internal wrinkle: the team page dates Ron Walters’ conception of 100-point coffee reviews to 1996, a year before the launch date the claim uses.3

To verify

Ownership and legal entity. Kim Westerman is listed as “Co-Owner” and Kenneth Davids and Ron Walters as co-founders,3 but no company name, corporate form or registration appears anywhere on the site, and none was found here. The research report behind this note also declined to name an owner and explicitly flagged its own guess at editorial independence as inference rather than documented fact. Who legally owns Coffee Review, and in what entity, is not established. Do not state a parent company or owner beyond the three names above.

To verify

A secondary summary of the scoring that does not match the primary. The research report behind this note leaned on a roaster’s blog (Utopian Coffee) which describes Coffee Review as rating coffees on “aroma, flavor, acidity, body, cleanliness, and sweetness,” on a 0–100 scale, distinguishing the top 1% of specialty coffees, with “above 94” meaning exceptional. Coffee Review’s own published rating guide says something different on every count: five categories (aroma, acidity, body, flavor, aftertaste — no cleanliness, no sweetness), a scale starting at 50, and 95–100 as the “Exceptional” band.4 The primary source is used above; the blog’s version is recorded here only so it is not silently repeated. The “top 1%” figure has no source at all and is not asserted anywhere on this note.

Footnotes

  1. Our Story — Coffee Review — the publication’s own about page; source of “Launched in 1997,” the “first-ever 100-point, wine-style coffee reviews” self-description, the stated mission, and the presence of advertising and paid review services — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Coffee Review — homepage — source of the “The World’s Leading Coffee Guide” self-description and the confirmed live URLs for the pages cited above — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

  3. Our Team — Coffee Review — the publication’s own masthead; source of Kenneth Davids and Ron Walters as co-founders, Kim Westerman as Co-Owner and Managing Editor, Jason Sarley as Associate Editor, the Q Grader credentials, the 1996 SCA Special Achievement Award, Walters’ 1996 conception of 100-point reviews, and the Berkeley lab — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  4. How to Interpret Coffee Reviews — Coffee Review — the publication’s own rating guide; source of the 50–100 scale, the five named score bands, and the five 1–10 attributes with their definitions — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. The World and the Cupping Table: 25 Years of Change at Coffee Review — Kenneth Davids’ 25th-year retrospective; source of “since 1997, making this our 25th year,” the “first in the world to apply 100-point ratings” and “first online publication” claims, and the thousands-of-coffees and 250-monthly-reports figures — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2

  6. Review Services — Coffee Review — the publication’s own submission terms; source of every fee above, the advertiser rates, the sample minimums, the blind-basis statement, “not assured of a favorable result,” and the sole-discretion publication clause — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

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