ABOUT ME
My name is Asser Christensen. I’m a journalist, a licensed Q Grader, and the guy behind The Coffee Chronicler.
For the past decade I’ve been taking coffee apart: brewing it, grading it, roasting it badly, then less badly, and writing about all of it. This site is where that work lives.
Most people drink coffee every day without much idea of where it comes from or what happens to it before it reaches the cup. They know a farmer in Brazil was probably involved, and that’s roughly it. My job is to fill in the rest. And this is where I do it.
What you can expect
Videos
Brew guides
Reviews
How I got here
Long time ago (18 years to be precise 😬) I started roasting coffee at home in my oven.
The first batches came out dark and scorched, but something about it hooked me. After a while I started to get better, and that’s when I got hooked on drinking fresh coffee. There was no going back.
Being a journalist by trade, writing about coffee was the obvious next step. So I launched my first coffee site in 2015. It was in Danish, which is my mother tongue. The plan was to create a simple coffee diary so other geeks could steal my notes, but it turned into an all-consuming project fairly quickly. Around the same time I started freelancing for several of the most prominent English-language coffee publications. And somewhere during that period I transformed from being a regular reporter, who liked coffee, to becoming more of a coffee chronicler: someone obsessed with the bean. And the history, the culture, the people, and the paraphernalia.
The more I wrote, and the more coffee farms and events I visited, the clearer it became that coffee is an international community. I could keep writing about obscure coffee shops in Danish, but far more people could follow along if I switched to English. That’s how the site you’re reading now came about.
Today I have connections across the whole value chain, from farmers to baristas to roasters. A lot of what ends up here on this page comes out of those conversations.
Why this site exists
Coffee is still full of misinformation and outdated ideas that get repeated everywhere.
My goal is to replace them with something accurate, whether that’s about beans, gear, or brewing.
Yes, it’s gotten a lot better over the last few years, but now there’s a new challenge: everything is so complicated. So another of my jobs is trying to simplify things, so they make sense for people who haven’t made coffee their whole lifestyle.
About the Q grader license
The Q Grader license is the coffee world’s version of the sommelier title. Originally, it was run by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI). It’s the most recognised certification in the industry. In 2025 it was moved over to SCA.
Passing the Q means clearing a series of exams in sensory and olfactory skill, green bean grading, and general coffee knowledge. Several are done blind under red light, so roast colour can’t give anything away. The license expires after 3 years, so graders have to recertify regularly. I’ve done so three times since 2018, most recently in 2025 under the so-called “evolved Q” curriculum.
It’s expensive and it takes time. I think it’s worth it. In a corner of the internet built almost entirely on personal opinion and intuition, it helps to have some grounding in objective standards.
Thanks for reading.
If you have a question or an idea, get in touch, or find me on Instagram.
Media Appearances/Interviews/Bylines
