Editorial Standards

Cupheine is a reference site. That only means something if you can check what we tell you, so this page describes how our articles are put together and what we will not claim.

Every specific claim carries a source

If an article states a number, a standard, a study or a date, it names where that came from. Sources are listed at the foot of the article and published as machine-readable citation data alongside it, so both readers and search engines can see what a claim rests on.

We check that every source link resolves before an article goes live. A reference site with dead citations is worse than one with none.

Where we can, we cite the primary source rather than the article written about it. When a paper sits behind a paywall or a standard is restricted to members of the body that publishes it, we say so and name the work precisely enough for you to find it.

We distinguish evidence from convention

A lot of received coffee wisdom is convention that hardened into fact. The familiar "ideal" brewing window of 18–22% extraction traces to taste panels run in the 1950s, and a 2023 study from the UC Davis Coffee Center found that consumer preference actually splits into two distinct groups rather than converging on one ideal.

When a widely repeated figure is a useful convention rather than a measured optimum, our articles say which it is. That distinction matters more in coffee than in most subjects, because so much of the advice online is copied without anyone checking where it started.

What we do not claim

We do not present research synthesis as first-hand testing. If we have not measured something ourselves, we do not imply that we have. There are no invented equipment tests, no fabricated tasting panels and no made-up measurements anywhere on this site. When an article explains what the published research shows, that is what it says it is doing.

This is worth stating plainly because the opposite is common. Invented experience is both easy to write and impossible to verify, and a reference site that does it once cannot be trusted on anything else.

Dates mean what they say

Every article shows when it was published and when it was last modified.

The modified date changes when the substance of an article changes. It does not move when we reprocess stored content for technical reasons, which is a deliberate choice — a site that refreshes its dates without revising its content is telling search engines something untrue about how current it is.

Corrections

We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If you find an error — a misstated figure, a misread study, a source that no longer says what we claim it says — tell us and we will look into it.

When we correct something substantive, we revise the article and its modified date reflects the change. We do not quietly delete pages that turn out to be mistaken.

Where our figures usually come from

Recurring sources across the site include the Specialty Coffee Association's standards and brewing research, the UC Davis Coffee Center and the Coffee Science Foundation, peer-reviewed food-science journals, and the historic reports of the Coffee Brewing Institute that much modern brewing advice still descends from. Individual articles cite exactly which.