Monday, August 14, 2006


coffee writing & microformats, redux

per my response to dougie's great comment on yesterday's post re microformats, i'm just posting my letter to tantek et. al. about this for further comment and discussion:

"hiya!

i'm very interested in hreviews for coffee. the entire specialty coffee industry and many people with coffee blogs like my own (bccy.blogspot.com) reviews different coffees. the advantages of hreview i think should be obvious in this case for consumers and roasters alike.

specialty coffee has a fairly uniform set of criteria for reviews. it's common to use the specialty coffee association of america's flavor wheel and to base reviews on the guidelines in ted lingle's cupper's handbook.

also, there are standard cupping sheets for review as well.

how could these standards be integrated into a subcategory of hreview? the basic hreview as i understand it from the creation tool won't work for coffee and we would need a slightly different structure.

in coffee we would need 7 standard fields: 1 for origin, 1 for taste, 1 for roast level, and 4 for the 4 parts of the bouquet, as well as 6 optional fields: an optional field for cupper's points, an optional field for balance, an optional field for estate, an optional field for varietal, an optional field for certifications (like fair trade, organic, etc.) and an optional field for purity.

the standard fields should have 2 parts: one part should be a dropdown offering the taste terms from the wheel, but also allow the user to enter a free choice of terms. the other part, which should be optional, would allow decimal numbers from 0 to 10 for those wishing to give a numerical rating according to the rules of the scaa cupping worksheet.

the 3 of the 6 optional fields should be free word choice, while the optional cuppers points, purity, and balance fields should accept decimal numbers from 0 to 10. the purity field numbers would be negative numbers, since lack of purity subtracts from the coffee.

the roast level field should accept free word choice or the option of entering agtron numbers, again, decimal format.

then a comments field, as in the creation tool example, and all the usual fields for reviewer, date, etc.

how would this be possible? i'm not a programmer, but this strikes me as really really useful. what should i do to start a
conversation on this?

any coffee lovers out there?

happy coffee,

fortune elkins"

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posted by fortune | 8:03 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments