How we curate

A coffee can be listed in the catalog only if all of the following are true:

1. Single origin.The coffee must come from one named farm, cooperative, or geographically-defined lot. Blends (whether by region, country, or process) are excluded. “100% Colombian” is not single origin; “Finca El Injerto, Pacaya, Guatemala” is.
2. Small-lot harvest. Lot size at the green-coffee stage must be ≤ roughly 1,500 kg (≈ 100 60-kg burlap bags). This threshold includes nano and micro lots, smallholder cooperative deliveries, and single-batch single-origin programs from quality-focused roasters (Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, Tim Wendelboe, etc.). It excludes estate-scale production, mass-produced single-origin SKUs from chains, and any roaster whose smallest available lot exceeds the cap.
3. Traceable. Producer name, country, region, and (where possible) farm name must be disclosed by the roaster.
4. Process must be disclosed honestly.Standard methods (washed, natural, honey, anaerobic, wet-hulled) should be labeled as such. Non-standard or proprietary methods (co-ferments, carbonic maceration variations, experimental fermentations, etc.) are allowed and encouraged for transparency, as long as the general process family and any unique inputs are explained in plain language on the coffee’s detail page. The bar is “would a curious consumer understand what’s happening to the bean before roasting?” — not “does this method appear on a standard list.”
5. Not contract-grown commodity coffee. Coffee grown under exclusive multi-year contracts at volumes inconsistent with rule #2 is excluded regardless of marketing claims.

Enforcement today is manual at submission time — there’s no upload form yet. The policy sets the standard we apply when adding coffees, and the standard users should expect us to uphold.

Reviews are user-generated and unedited. To keep them trustworthy:

1. No self-review. Growers, producers, distributors, roasters, and their immediate family or business partners may not submit reviews for coffees they have a financial interest in.
2. No false disparagement.Reviews must reflect the reviewer’s actual tasting experience. Claims about health effects, contamination, ethical violations, or legal issues must be substantiated or omitted. Personal attacks on named individuals are not allowed.
3. No bots, no paid reviews, no review-for-review schemes. Detection is heuristic for now: suspicious timing patterns, identical phrasing across users, reviews from accounts with no other activity, and reviews traced back to compensation will be removed.
4. No review editing or removal for non-policy reasons.We don’t delete negative reviews because a roaster complains. Reviews are only removed for the specific policy violations listed here.
5. Disclosure of relevant conflicts. Reviewers are encouraged (not required) to disclose free samples, gifts, or other compensation received.