When I started this coffee blog 9 years ago with two friends, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write about.
First and foremost, I wanted to write about cafés. I fell in love with coffee shops before I started drinking black coffee. I had a personal blog where I talked about the coffee shops I went to and those posts would get the most traffic. It seemed like a natural progression to start a website that would guide people to the best coffee shops, and thecoffeecompass.com was born.
What I didn’t want to write were coffee reviews. At the time there was a glut of coffee blogs focusing on coffee reviews, assigning points or stars, quibbling over tasting notes. It felt tedious to me. So I made a decision: no coffee reviews. In the early days, we received almost weekly inquiries from roasters that offered to send us coffee, and though we happily received any free coffee a roaster wanted to send us, we made it clear we weren’t going to review it on this website….
