Editorial policy
How material on Best Coffee Bean Site is produced, checked and changed.
Who writes it
Records are compiled from primary documents where those exist — producing board publications, export standards, research institute variety catalogues — and from trade reporting where they do not. Every record names its source and states which of those two it is.
What gets published
A figure is published when we can name where it came from and when it was checked. A figure that cannot carry both is not published, and the field stays blank and labelled rather than being estimated.
Where two sources we would each be willing to cite disagree, we record the disagreement rather than choosing. Colombia’s mitaca share of national output is a live example: one report sourced to the national federation puts it at 45 to 55 per cent of national production, while other sources describe it as 20 to 40 per cent of the main crop — a different quantity against a different denominator. The honest record says contested.
What we correct, and how
When a figure changes we change the record and move its checked date. Where the correction matters to a reader’s decision — a threshold that moved, a standard that was superseded — the record says what it used to say and what changed it.
We treat our own earlier material the same way we treat anybody else’s. A claim that was reasonable when it was written and is now known to be wrong is a wrong claim.
Common errors we do not repeat
Some claims are close to universal in English-language coffee writing and are wrong. We do not print them, and where a reader is likely to have met them elsewhere we say so explicitly on the record.
Supremo is a better grade than Excelso
They are not parallel grades. Excelso is Colombia’s export standard, and Supremo is one of several PREPARATIONS inside it, separated by screen size, alongside UGQ, Caracol, Europa, Extra, Premium and Maragogipe. The near-universal retail phrasing describes a ladder the standard does not have.
Pink Bourbon is a Bourbon
It is Ethiopian landrace material, in the same group as Chiroso and Sidra, and unrelated to Bourbon or Typica despite the name. Genetic testing of five lots sold as Pink Bourbon found two mixed with Bourbon, two with Catimor and one pure — so the name fails twice: wrong lineage, and unverified in the bag.
Castillo is a variety
Castillo is a composite of many released lines: a general release of around 35, plus regional releases and three zonal ones. Cenicafé states plainly that composite varieties are not phenotypically uniform. One row labelled “Castillo” collapses a dozen distinct releases into a single claim.
A country has a harvest season
Harvest is per region, per altitude band, per crop, and it moves year to year with the weather. Within one Colombian department the low farms can finish before the high farms start, and the “secondary” mitaca is the principal harvest in several departments. At least one widely used harvest calendar has Colombia’s two crops inverted.
An 88-point coffee beats an 87-point coffee
Only if both were scored on the same form. Three regimes are live at once: the SCA 2004 form, the SCA Coffee Value Assessment adopted in November 2024 which superseded it, and Cup of Excellence’s own form, which was never the SCA form. Plus private house variants. The number is not the measurement; the number and the protocol together are.
This is what coffee costs
Five different transactions are all called “the price”, and they differ by three orders of magnitude on the same day. A farmgate figure, a C-market quote, an FOB, an auction result and a shelf price are not comparable, and converting between them without the published factors invents a number rather than deriving one.
Commercial relationships
Advertising is served programmatically and advertisers have no input into what is recorded. Where affiliate links appear they are disclosed. No record has ever been altered, added or removed at the request of a seller, and a request to do so would be published rather than acted on.
Machine-generated text
Drafting tools are used in producing copy on this site. Every figure, every source attribution and every claim about a standard is checked against the source by a person before it is published. A tool that produces fluent text about a document it has not read is exactly the failure mode this site exists to correct, and we hold ourselves to the same rule we apply to everybody else.