Unpacking Coffee relaunches as free tasting platform for coffee notes, sharing
Ray and Kandace Brigleb turned Unpacking Coffee into a free, public tasting log, aiming to make cupping notes easier to keep, share and rediscover.
Ray and Kandace Brigleb are trying to make better tasting notes less lonely. The couple has relaunched Unpacking Coffee as a free, web-based platform that lets home tasters and cuppers log a coffee, save it privately like a personal notebook, or send it into a public database that could grow into a shared record of what the community is drinking and remembering.
The idea is built for the parts of coffee memory that usually slip away: roaster, origin, post-harvest processing, variety, brew method, recipe, flavor tags and an optional score all live in one quick entry. Unpacking Coffee’s homepage calls it “social coffee tracking and sharing for antisocial people,” and says users can “Log a cupping in under a minute” and keep the service “free forever.” For curious home tasters, regular cuppers and coffee club members, that makes the platform feel less like another app and more like a single place where a coffee can be found again months later.
The relaunch grew out of about a year and a half of development and a longer history for the project itself. Needmore Designs says Unpacking Coffee began in 2015 as a video podcast focused on roasters, branding and packaging, and produced 76 episodes over the years. Ray Brigleb’s coffee background runs deep for a design founder: Needmore says he was the first employee at Stumptown Coffee Roasters and later created the tasting app Cuppin. Kandace Brigleb described the new direction as more collaborative, while Ray Brigleb said the platform may be especially useful for people who drink a lot of coffee at home and need a better way to remember the ones they liked.
That shift from private note-taking to shared recordkeeping landed at World of Coffee San Diego, the first North American edition of the Specialty Coffee Association’s event, held April 10 to 12, 2026. The timing fit a wider wave in specialty coffee interest in the United States, where consumption hit a 14-year high in 2025. If Unpacking Coffee catches on, it could become more than a place to stash tasting notes. It could turn those notes into a shared ritual, where the community is not just talking about coffee, but building its memory together.
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