Follow the links below to articles written by Tom & Maria (and a few great pieces by others in the coffee trade); some facts, some opinions, some mine, some not.

Article Categories:

• Home Roasting FAQs and Tip Sheets
• Home Roaster Tip Sheets
• Home Roasting Methods and Modifications
• Brewing FAQs
• Other Roasters, Obsolete Roasters
• Green and Roasted Coffee Evaluation (articles by Sweet Maria's)
• Green and Roasted Coffee Evaluation (articles by others)
• Espresso Equipment and Other Coffee Equipment
• Our Coffee Travels
• Health concerns, caffeine, decaffeination
• Coffee Producing Origins (articles from other sources)
• Odds and Ends
• Coffee Cultivation and Technical Aspects
• Sweet Maria's Other Coffee Pictorials
• Tiny Joy (our newsletter) Archives

The Home Coffee Roasting Mailing List is a free discussion group for our home roaster customers. A small, focused mailing list can be a great way to exchange ideas and opinions. Please subscribe today!We have an improved list subscription process, a Digest version and an Archive!

New Sweetmaria's Weblog has current comments about newly arriving coffees and other such things. Also check out our separate Roasted Weblog. Yep, we're making logs here. For our weekly roasted coffee we have Sweet Maria's Roasted Weblog. And check out our on-line back issues of our printed Tiny Joy newsletter, which you receive along with your orders from Sweet Maria's.

Sweet Maria's: about our shop, about us, our history.

Click Here for Sweet Maria's List of
Further Readings and Internet Resources

General Home Roasting FAQs
and Tip Sheets

• Roasting Basics Information Sheet

• Pictorial Guide to The Roast Process

• My Comparison Chart of Home Roasters

• Maria has written a FAQ called How to Choose a Home Roaster - a good summary of the options.

  Blending Basics (with Espresso Blend section)

• Stovetop Corn Popper Roasting (Whirley-Pop)

• Stovetop Pan or Wok Roasting

• Oven Roasting

• Air Popper Roasting (right type of Popper)

• Cooling the Roast

• Roasted Coffee Storage

• Green Coffee Storage

• Behmor 1600 roaster
• Gene Cafe Roaster
  
• Hearthware iRoast 2 Tip Sheet
  
• Zach & Dani's Tip Sheet
  
• HotTop Roasting Tip Sheet
  
• FreshRoast Tip Sheet
  
• Hearthware iRoast Tip Sheet
  
• Caffe Rosto Tip Sheet

• Swissmar Alpenrost Tip Sheet
  • Roasting Less Than 8 Ounces in the Alpenrost
  • Alpenrost Cleaning Instructions
  • Alpenrost Simple Diagnostic
    
• Hearthware Precision Tip Sheet

• Hearthware Precision Troubleshooting FAQ

• Hearthware Gourmet Tip Sheet

• Building your own roaster: To help those making their own BBQ Roasters, here are some samples of perforated metals.

• Here are pictures of the Jabez Burns Sample Roaster, perhaps of interest to those building their own drum roaster from a gas barbeque. Also see my poge of all various roasters I have encountered...

• Here is an unattributed article on re-wiring the Freshroast so fan and heater can be controlled separately (by a Variac or such).

• I have a Hearthware I-Roast Review with pictures.

• Air Popper Modifications -Adding a Thermometer

• Making a Thermometer Clip for our Marshall and Cooper Thermometers

• Air Popper Modifications -Using a Timer

• Air Popper Modifications -Experimental Chimneys

• Air Popper Modifications -Installing a Switch

• Our Coffee Review Reference Page

• Grinding and Brewing Basics Information Sheet

• Vacuum Brewing in the Cona

• Vacuum Brewing in the Bodum Santos

• Vacuum Brewing in the Yama

• New: Stovetop Vacuum Brew Pictorial (Yama, Bodum Santos)

• Filter-Drip Brewing with the Chemex

• Brewing in the Technivorm

• Brewing Coffee in an Ibrik

• Moka Pot Brewing (Stovetop Espresso)

• Zassenhaus Care and Use Instructions

Other Roasters, Obsolete Roasters

Roasting and Green Coffee Evaluation Topics:
Articles by Sweet Maria's

• I created a new version of the Roasted Coffee Pictorial Guide with much improved pictures. Click on the small images to see the larger versions, and I have also added a multi-bean photo for each roast stage.

• We also have an older Degree of Roast pictorial page

• Tom logs all the incoming samples that I cup whether we buy them or not. Tom's Cupping Log. This might, over time, give people an idea of the process, and all the coffees we go through to find the really nice lots. Also, we have a single page listing of all the Moisture Content Readings of our currrent stock
  
  
• I updated the Coffee Production Yearly Timetable to reflect peak crop pickings and shippings, but it is still a very rough guide to the crop cycle.

• Taste Terminology and Roast Names

• How We Select Coffees, and "Cupping"

• Here's the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel!

• We have a Roast Temperature Curve Page (under construction!)

• Here's Looking at Green Beans

• Green Coffee Storage for home roasters

• Green Coffee Freshness Issues

• An quick look at the fun stuff we find in coffee, sometimes.

• Our Coffee Cupping Review Archives

• Coffee Packaging and Freshness

• A little cupping test performed on Ethiopia Yirgacheffe to evaluate any difference in the cup character based on screen size.

• Another attempt to explain the differences in roasted coffee color, surface texture, and corresponding ground coffee color.

• A collection of single-bean macro images representing different varietals and processes. It's not exhaustive at all, but simply what I had nearby. -Tom

• I have updated the page about my coffee plant collection, AKA Growing Coffee at Home.

• The Gesha lots are here (summer 2008) and I made a page to help with roasting, using my new Canon 100mm macro lens! Gesha Roast Pictures page

• Costa Rica RIP Red Honey Coffee. RIP? Roasted In Parchment. This coffee has not been dry-milled, the green bean is still in the outer shell. In perhaps the wackyest moment in Sweet Maria's history, we discovered you can roast coffee in the parchment shell, and it has a very unusual flavor. This is for experts only, since you can't really see the green coffee as it turns brown. See the review and the pictures of the RIP process.

• Here is our first attempt and a handy Roasted Postcard, and an explanation of why it kinda failed to be what we had hoped...

• I did a short page on the First Ever Cupping Class at Sweet Maria's that happened July 2008.

Espresso Equipment and Other Coffee Equipment

Roasting and Green Coffee Evaluation Topics:
Great Articles from Other Sources

• Here's some photos of us moving and installing our Probat L12 (12 kilo) Roaster!

• Use and care of the Coffee Cuppers Spittoon!

• Here's a look at the professional sample roasters we brought in from Brazil.

• Espresso Pages- Tom worked on these pages a lot a long time ago - but there was never a link to them that could be easily found. The information is still good- though I am sure he would consider the pages to be still a work in progress (4 years later) .... Maria

• Just to prove I am down with the whole barista competition thing, we have started offering limited quantities of ou own special 12 oz. jars of Barista Jam. Okay, that's not true, but our new line of products we call Baristawarez2000 is all too real. Strictly for the serious shot-puller.

• A page with my hand-pull Pavoni espresso machine observations, and full scans of the diagram charts and parts lists heretofore not available on the net

• Vacuum Brewing in the Hario Brewer (we no longer sell any Hario but this is FYI)

• How to adjust the Solis 177 Mulino grind range.

• The Pasquini Livia 90

• I made a page for our new/old La San Marco Hand-Pull Espresso Behemoths.

• A page with some interesting microscopic images of the coffee seed, and the difference between a healthy bean and a defective bean.

• Coffee Production Yearly Timetable

• Here's an interesting article on Coffee Bitterness and the role of CGAs, chlorogenic acids.

• A fascinating article "Tourist in a Taste Lab" from Discover magazine on the varying sensitivity to taste from one person to the next...

• Roasting Article by Carl Staub from SCAA Roast Kit Literature

• I have uploaded some interesting articles from past SCAA presentations I attended, or nearly attended... Sensory Evaluation of Coffee, one on Comparisons of Wine & Coffee, and an article on Evaluation of Green Coffee Samples. Each has some valuable tidbits.

• Green Coffee Storage From Crop to Cup
  This is an article about green coffee storgage on a large scale. Listed below is an article about green coffee storage for home roasters.

• Preface to Coffee Quality by Michael Sivetz

• Robusta Characteristics from Nestle

• Here is the San Francisco Chronicle Home Roasting article that resulted in way too many drop-in customers at our warehouse...
  
  
• We have some new pictures pertaining to our Rwanda coffees. Our lot of Womens Coop Duhingekawa Rushashi demands a separate Duhingekawa page with additional photos and information about this group. And our Rwanda Butare Bourbon is the result of improvements at the Bufcafe cooperative mill. Washing stations (wet mills) are communal, and often used by more than one farm or cooperative. Here is info about the wet mill improvement project.
  
  
  
• An interesting article about coffee chemistry and freshness.
  
  
• A tribute to Paul Stauder Jr., an important person who helped us get some of our greatest Guatemala coffees.
  
• We have posted a .PDF version of the Imbibe Magazine article that featured 3 Sweet Maria's home roasting customers.

Coffee Travels:
Our Coffee Trade, Farm & Cupping Trips

I don't document every trip, and yet this category has grown rather large... hence 2 columns

Coffee Travels:
Our Coffee Trade, Farm & Cupping Trips

(Continued)

• Ben and Maria met me in Costa Rica for a Central America Family Coffee get-together, and then we all went to the Best of Panama competition in Boquete.

• During and after the 2009 El Salvador Cup of Excellence, I visited some of our important coffee sources, such as Aida Batlle's Kilimanjaro farm, and Vickie Dalton's Finca Matalapa. Here's some photos of my El Salvador Travels

• El Salvador Cup of Excellence 2009 photos. Woo!

• SCAA 2009 Atlanta. A Grumpy Commentary

• Tom's trip reports from the trip he made in late March to Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua are just posted. The trips were short - but action packed! Lots of good information about what we can expect in terms of coffees from the new crop in these countries. And of course, lots of fun photos.- Maria

• I'm not finished yet. I keep generating material from this recent Africa trip. I was writing some actual commentary. Here is a link to the Kenya Travelogue, and here you can find commentary from Ethiopia -Tom

• Tom took a trip to Sumatra and Sulawesi in November 2008; it was a looonnng trip that seemed all too short. I divided the pictures into

• • North Sumatra, including Lintong and the Lake Toba area
• The Aceh District of Sumatra (actually north of North Sumatra!) which includes Takengon and the areas around Lake Tawar
• .... and then Sulawesi and Tana Toraja, an amazing, mystical place, where I handily whacked my head crawling through a tunnel in a Toraja traditional burial cave. It still hurts. -Tom
• Tom returned from a Cupping Competition in Peru September 2008 with a handful of pictures, and some thoughts on why Peru coffee isn't as respected as it could be ...
• 
  The shennanigans of the Costa Rica Micro-Millers visit to Sweet Maria's September 2008.
  
  
• I have 2 new photosets for recent trips to Ethiopia's Harar region, and from the first-ever Rwanda Cup of Excellence Competition 2008. You can also view both of these on our Coffee Image Gallery site.
  
  
• Many may not know about the problems internal to the SCAA Roaster's Guild, but it came to a head at the 2008 Roaster's Guild Retreat due to gangs from Mille Lac. Read more ...
  
  
• I had a very interesting Colombia trip to Huila, Cauca and Narino districts in late May 2008 but have been delayed getting the pictures together. You can also see it on the beta images site.
  

  I did a lot of cupping in Guatemala City looking for special lots, and then some quick trips to farms in the nearby states. Check out my Guatemala Travelogue. What, another Guatemala trip a few weeks later, with the family (Maria, Ben, my Mom, Myself), and yet another Guatemala Picturelog for 2008.

• I can't go to the Tolima area of Colombia where our Las Florestales is from ... there's too much FARC Guerilla activity in the area! But our coffee sourcer for this lot, Genevieve was able to go.

• A whirlwind tour of Costa Rica Micro Mills in mid February 2008!

• January 2008: India ... another example of gross camera addiction. I took 1350 images, and narrowed it down to 302 for my India Travelogue. There's also a brief essay.

• Here's a travelogue of my trip to Ethiopia in November 2007 to cup at many exporters in Addis Ababa, and get ready for the new crop coffees.

• It took a week to sort through them all, but here is my little travelogue for Yemen in November 2007, just 350 photos or so. You can view it here, or on our new beta site Image Gallery. It's one of the most intriguing coffee origins, and one of the best trips I have taken.

• A short but sweet cupping trip to the Dota, Tarrazu and Naranjo regions of Costa Rica.
  
  
• Since we are finally offering Daterra Yellow Bourbon, I have made a page to describe Daterra Farms, including a snippet of my travelogue and photos of their amazing coffee processing system.
• A real short trip to Motozintla, Mexico, "land of the squirrels," way south in Chiapas state at the border with Guatemala.

• Here's my totally uninformative picture book of the 2007 Roasters Guild Retreat and a matching, very curmudgeonly comments about the 2007 SCAA Conference in Long Beach

• Peru, what an amazing place, what a screwy place in terms of coffee. If I seem too harsh, 395 photos in a travelog (and a video to boot) should show the enthusiasm I also have for Peru ... there are 7 pages of thumbnail images, and I hope you find some of it, if not most of it, interesing: Peru Coffee Tour 2006

• Travelog for Guatemala Cup of Excellence and other Guatemala travels 2006

• Travelog for El Salvador Cup of Excellence 2006

• I posted new travelogs for my recent trips, with all my coffee competition cupping scores and the final results. First off was the 2006 Best of Panama competition, then off to to Honduras Cup of Excellence 2006 in San Pedro Sula, and finally the 2006 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition in Granada, Nicaragua (a beautiful colonial town). I hope you can tolerate some tongue-in-cheek commentary, with a smattering of useful observations. Lots of pictures, and some of them actually have something to do with coffee! -Tom

• Back from the Brasil Cafe do Cerrado 2005 event , but off to Bolivia Cup of Excellence (hurricane permitting)[hurricane was not permitting - here are the Bolivia 2005 winners though]. I had time to parse 800 photos and ended up with about 150 that I just had to share. Why do I do this? I don't know. And be warned that a lot of it is not about coffee, strictly speaking. -Tom
  

• Since we are finally offering Daterra Yellow Bourbon, I have made a page to describe Daterra Farms, including a snippet of my travelogue and photos of their amazing coffee processing system.

• January harvest trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador and a whole mess o' pictures, as usual. Check out the Nicaragua - El Salvador Travelogue

• I have finished the travelog for my Colombia Trip, which includes the 2005 Cup of Excellence competition. It's a different format than before, more and I put a lot of work into it. I hope you get something out of it... And there is a special feature: What does a coffee cupping room sound like? Well, I made a little stereo recording while walking around the room at the 2005 Colombia CoE.

• I am back from Kona and the 2004 Kona Cupping Competition and made a travelogue of the event ... which feels a bit incomplete. Even with a limited time there, it makes a big impression and there is no way to convey it in a few photos. -Tom

• I have finished my rather extensive travelogue from Brazil 2004 Cerrado Competition and Coffee Tour. Maria thinks I am nuts. I spent 3 days trimming down my 600 pictures to a mere 179, and writing the decriptions for each. There is just so much I learn on each new trip, so these web pages are as much for myself as you everyone else. I hope you get some

• I finally finished a complete journal and slide show for my trip as a judge at the 2004 El Salvador Cup of Excellence Competition!

• I also did a "slide show" of pictures from the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence coffee competition, 2004 . It took me a long time to get the pages together and so I am sorry it lacks detail. But there are some nice images...

• I created a sort of quick and temporary page of images from last week's Costa Rica trip. More to come...

• There's a new pictorial of my 2003 trip to the Bolivia Coffee Competition in 2 sections Page 1 and Page 2, and a short Bolivia Movie too!

• I have made a "slide show" of my trip to the 2003 Best of Panama cupping competition.

• My Honduras Cupping Trip 2003: Part One is the competition and tour of the Northern coffee lands. Part Two is the tour of the Southern coffee lands near the capital of Tegucigalpa.

• I have a lot of information and pictures from a tour of Nicaragua this year, including judging in the Cup of Excellence competition.

  • The 2003 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence

  • Trip to Matagalpa & Nueva Segovia

  • The remarkable coffee farm Selva Negra

  • Co-op coffee from Prodecoop and La Union

• Tom's 2001 SCAA Convention Report ...bitter, very bitter.

• I had a couple comments and pictures from the 2003 SCAA Conference in Boston.

  A new page from my trip to the Panama Cupping Competition in early April 2002 is done!

• I have finally completed a lengthy pictorial page on my Trip to the Guatemala Highlands, April 2001

Health Concerns, Caffeine, Decaffeinating

The Ecology of Coffee

• Health and Ecological Concerns

• I get frustrated reading magazine articles that oversimplify the issues with coffee production - they are just big sales pitches to niche markets in my mind. And I am not anti-organic! But are you doing "the right thing" when you buy cheap Peru Organic at Trader Joe's. Actually, no. I decided to write a respone to one I call "Organic Alarmists"

• Here's some information about Utz Kapeh, a new sorta "Fair Trade Lite" showing up in the US market for the first time on our Brazil Impanema Dulce.

• The Caffeine FAQ

• Ethyl Acetate Decaf Process by Cafiver Inc

• The CO-2 Decaf Method

• Genetic Decaf Coffee Trees!

• Please also see our page about how we donate to relief organizations

The Odds and Ends!

Coffee Cutivation and Technical Aspects.

• Oddball coffee muzics ...

• It's summer and that means PNWG III! And also the San Francisco Bay Area Home Roaster get-together, featuring Jeffrey Paulins computer controlled Hot Top.The SCAA show in Seattle went down and I went up, and felt downbeat so did this write-up which comes down on things but it's up to you to decide what's going down when upscale coffee sellers are really sliding downslope ... blah blah blah. -Tom

• Mike McKoffee has prepared a Costa Rica La Minita (CRLM) cupping from the last 4 crops and I was one of the cuppers in the experiment. Here's my results.

• The Home Roast List's Pacific Northwest Gathering #2 was in Oakland (Oakland Oregon that is. Here are some fairly lame pictures I took...

• Read about Tom's attempts to fashion a custom chaff collector for the Hearthware iRoast

• Roasting Cocoa Beans at Home (or ...not)

• ...and ... Regis Hanna wrote a great description of processing raw cacao into hot chocolate.

• Recipe that used our Green Coffee

• Home Roasting; Why Bother?

• We have a periodic cupping club called RoastBusters. Here's the results of the last one...

• A review from the NYT for the book Uncommon Grounds

• Coffee, History, Literature: Coffee has inspired some great historical comment, essays, protests, opera, etc. Here are some of my favorite historical quotations on the subject of coffee

• Sweet Maria's coffees were reviewed by Ken Davids in Sept. 99 CoffeeReview

• Coffee is still transported as it was 200 years ago, in 60 to 70 Kg Burlap Coffee Bags. Here's a sampling of ours...

• Here's what a real East Bay coffee warehouse looks like.

• The new sweet maria's skateboard a la natas kaupas for freestyle flip tricks is but a hoax. Well, yes and no. I have one, but you can't ride it... unless you come to west oakland, and ask nicely. And sign this waiver ...
  
  
• Here's some pictures of our empty old place in Emeryville and our new place in hot, upcoming, hi-energy West Oakland!

• Coffee Cultivars: Here is a collection of images from my travels of many different types of varietals

• I tried to put together a pictorial about how I grow coffee plants at home. This is dated now, and I have over 60 plants with at least 25 unique cultivars represented, including robusta types, liberica, excelsa and other non-arabica coffees.

• A friend sent me a couple interesting photos from India, which I turned into a page about Exotic Coffee Cultivars

• My review of El Salvador 2004 Cup of Excellence includes a visit to the ProCafe Experimental Coffee Farm with lots of Cultivar Pictures!

• Coffee vs. Wine, the debate goes on. This was the article I prepared for the March Tiny Joy, before editing it

• How about Home Processing Coffee? Well, you need coffee cherry to do that. I brought back some extra from Costa Rica so I gave home wet-processing a try

• I had made a page that concerns Buying Bags of Coffee, essentially some insights about dealing with brokers and why I feel like home roasters and startup roasters should be cautioned away from doing so. Might sound self-serving, but there's other reasons for this position... Nice pictures too!

• An updated look at Organic and Fair Trade coffee in Ethiopia, as of 2004

• Coffee from the Island of Saint Helena is something we get when it is available and when it is good. But the crop is very limited, and there have been problems with reliability lately. Whether we will have it again is a unsure...

• Our coffee shipment on the way from the Isle of St. Helena. Here's some wonderful pictures!

• It's the middle of the busy season but it's also time for the Brazil Coffee Auction! I posted a list of the winning coffees and a few comments and our lot, the Boa Vista (due in March)

• Here's some comments and pictures from a recent cupping of India Coffees with Ken Davids, and a tour of Mr. Espresso's wood-fired roasters.

• I had a nice visit over at Intelligentsia in Chicago, a roasting company I hold in high regard...

• We have a special page dedicated to our winning lot of 2002 Brazil Cup of Excellence Auction Lot, Fazenda Boa Vista