I started keeping tasting notes on a phone the year I moved cities and could no longer remember which café had the flat white I liked. The list grew into a habit, the habit into a route through other people's mornings, and eventually into this journal.
halfasleep.coffee is a personal record — not a review site, not scored to a rubric. What you'll find here are coffees that were worth remembering, cafés that treated the craft seriously, the occasional strong opinion about milk temperature, and, increasingly, the odd deep dive into fermentation, water chemistry, or grinder burrs. I write when the coffee is worth writing about.
I'm based in Chandigarh, and I travel more than I probably should. If you're in a city I'm about to visit and have a café I should sit in, please tell me. If a coffee I've written up tastes like something specific I couldn't name, please tell me that too — I collect other people's tasting notes the way some people collect stamps.
Each entry is written by hand after the coffee — sometimes days after, sometimes in the same morning. The tasting card lives beside the words so you can find the spec without reading the whole thing, and the atlas keeps track of the places the cups have come from. There's no algorithm here, no engagement graph. Just a person and a scale.
Set in Fraunces and JetBrains Mono, both freely available. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Written by hand in a plain text editor. If you'd like to build something similar, everything you need is a folder of HTML files and about an afternoon.