About

A coffee review site?

Well yes, but maybe not the way you think. My goal with this site isn't really to create a place for people to come and quickly browse the review to know what they should buy next. Instead, I want to share and discuss my coffee experiences so that I can better understand them and how they relate to others.

Who am I?

I'm basically just someone who really likes coffee. I started drinking it to stay awake in an 8:00am microeconomics class during college but from there, coffee became a pursuit and a hobby. I began to find that I really enjoyed spending my free time seeking out the best coffee shops around me. Somewhere around 2009 I came across a Youtube channel called CoffeeCupNews (sadly not online anymore) that was just a guy sitting down with a cup of coffee and talking about it. He would smell it, taste it, talk about where it came from, who roasted it, and that's about it. I began buying the same coffees that he was buying and sitting down with the coffee and his video and trying to smell and taste what was experiencing. I don't think I could recommend a better way for the average person to get into coffee, unless they have some friends they can add to the mix!

After that I pursued a lot of different hobbyist avenues in coffee. I was ever pursing the latest and greatest brewing methods.I had a coffee review blog from ~2011 that was a lot of fun. After that I started roasting coffee at home. I had the privilege of going through Mill City's Roasting 101 training in 2017. Since then my Dad and I have been roasting coffee together every week trying to hone our methods. A few years ago one of my closest friends opened a local coffee shop (I live vicariously through him in many ways). In March of 2022, I was writing down some tasting notes from a batch my Dad and I roasted and I remembered my old coffee review blog and realized that I missed it. So now, Coffee Quandry is my latest attempts to share my coffee experiences publicly.

Influences

Jason Coffee (of CoffeeCupNews) was the first person that I saw review coffee. Everything I do probably owes a little bit to him in one way or another. Aside from that, I've always been fond of Ralfy in the whisky world. He does old-school Youtube videos where he sits down with a pour of scotch and talks about it. He's prolific now. He only reviews that which he buys and has thus become somewhat of a bastion of independent thought in Scotch. Outside of the culinary realm, I always had a soft spot for Roger Ebert's style and reputation in cinema that I was drawn to. When a movie came out that I was interested in I wanted to read Ebert's review -- not because I wanted to know if it was good -- but because I wanted to know what Ebert thought of it. It was through the way that he shared his experiences that my own were enriched.

So here's to being more like Jason, Ralfy and Ebert than Anton Ego.

Cheers!