Editorial Standards
Published so you can hold us to it.
Facts and sources
These claims always require a named source: production and export statistics, market share and rankings, acreage and farm size, altitude figures, historical dates, species distribution, climate data, caffeine and chemical comparisons, geographical indication status, and anything attributed to a specific company or person.
Sources are listed on the page, with the publisher, the URL, and the date we accessed it. Coffee statistics are revised often, so the access date is part of the citation.
We prefer primary sources: the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, FAOSTAT, the International Coffee Organization, the Vietnam General Statistics Office and Ministry of Agriculture, provincial agriculture departments, the Intellectual Property Office of Vietnam, peer-reviewed research, World Coffee Research, and producer organisations.
We avoid: SEO blogs repeating each other, unsourced social posts, AI-generated pages, recipe aggregators and ecommerce product descriptions.
We never invent a citation. If we cannot find a source for a number, the number does not go on the page.
Uncertainty
Where a claim is contested, poorly documented or an estimate, the page says so in the sentence itself rather than in a footnote.
Several widely repeated claims about Vietnamese coffee trace back to a single unsourced assertion. Where we have found that to be the case — the 1857 introduction, the origin of egg coffee — we say what is well established and what is not.
Pages also carry an internal list of claims we still want to verify. Those are not shown to readers, but they are in the source files and they get worked through.
Flavour claims
We do not assert that coffee from a region tastes a particular way. We say it is “commonly described as”, because flavour varies far more by farm, variety, processing and roast than by province, and a region-wide flavour guarantee would be wrong about most individual coffees.
We do not publish tasting notes for coffees we have not tasted.
Products
We do not claim to have tested a product unless we have. Every recommendation states what it is based on. Every recommendation includes limitations. See the affiliate disclosure.
Vietnamese language and culture
Diacritics are kept in everything readers see. Đắk Lắk, Đà Lạt, Buôn Ma Thuột, cà phê sữa đá. URLs use ASCII.
Vietnamese terms are explained on first use and then used normally, rather than replaced with an English approximation.
We avoid the standard stereotypes. Not every Vietnamese person drinks condensed-milk coffee. Not all Vietnamese coffee is robusta, dark-roasted, or brewed in a phin. Vietnamese specialty coffee exists and is growing. Vietnamese coffee culture is not frozen in 1975.
We represent both the traditional pavement-stool culture and the modern specialty scene, because both are real and both are current.
Writing
We write for people, not for search engines. Pages are as long as the question requires and no longer. We do not pad to a word count.
We avoid the standard filler: “in the world of coffee”, “whether you’re a seasoned enthusiast or just beginning”, “rich tapestry”, “hidden gem”, “embark on a journey”, “elevate your experience”. Where a concrete sentence and a general one both work, we use the concrete one.
Images
Every informative image carries descriptive alt text that says what is in it, not “coffee image”.
Photography on this site is AI-generated to illustrate the subject matter, and is labelled as such in the site’s documentation. Diagrams, maps and charts are drawn as SVG from real data. We do not present generated images as documentary photographs of specific named farms, people or places.
Corrections
Material errors are corrected and noted rather than quietly edited. If you find one, tell us what the page says and what it should say.