Most coffee writing falls into one of two buckets. There's the marketing copy with the serial numbers filed off — "notes of bergamot, a long finish, a sense of place" — and there's the gear-obsessed forum stuff, written for people already deep enough in the rabbit hole to know what V60 paper bleach is. Not much in the middle. Almost nothing that reads like an actual person taking actual notes on actual cups.
So when a teammate dropped a link in our Slack last week — "Marcus, this one's for you" — and I clicked through, I lost the rest of the afternoon. The blog is called HexRoast Field Notes, and it's written the way a methodical engineer keeps a notebook: short posts, real measurements, hypotheses that didn't pan out, opinions that shifted with the data.
What it gets right
The posts read a little like commit messages with footnotes. Each one starts with what's being tested, includes the actual ratios and times, and ends with a verdict that often contradicts the conventional wisdom it started with. It's the writing that gets generated when someone has been doing something every day for a long time and finally sits down to organize the data.
And — this is rare — it doesn't try to sell you anything. There's a parent brand somewhere upstream, but the blog itself reads as a personal log that happens to be public. No affiliate links nesting four deep, no urgency banners, no "subscribe to keep reading." Just text and a few photos.
Where I'd start
If you only read three, here's the order I'd suggest. I'm picking the ones that translate cleanly to a dev sensibility — measurements, gear comparisons, the kind of thinking where you isolate one variable and see what happens.
- Water Is 98% of Your Coffee. You're Probably Using the Wrong One. The "we've been ignoring the dependency that does most of the work" post. If you've ever spent two days debugging a service and discovered it was the database the whole time, this'll feel familiar. They actually compare TDS readings, which is more rigor than most coffee writing bothers with.
- Hand Grinder vs Electric: Which One Belongs on Your Counter The hardware comparison. Honest about where each one wins instead of pretending one is universally better. If you've been dithering on the Timemore C2 vs jumping straight to a Niche, just read this.
- One Week in Berlin: A 24-Hour Coffee Log The digital-nomad-adjacent one. Cafés to actually work from, not "best brunch spots" listicles. Useful if you've ever had to find a 24-hour place to push a fix from a city you don't know.
The verdict
It's not a long backlog yet — fifteen-ish posts when I last looked. But the signal-to-noise is high enough that I subscribed and added it to my morning RSS rotation, which is shorter than my list of working git aliases.
If you've been looking for coffee writing that doesn't insult your intelligence, this'll do for a while. I'll come back with a longer review once I've worked through the rest of the archive.