What is Deskbrew?
Deskbrew is a map for rating and comparing office coffee. One physical office location is one entry. People find a workplace, read its taste score and factual details, and submit their own rating in about thirty seconds. Frankfurt is the first launch city.
How is the office coffee score calculated?
Only taste ratings feed the score. Each rating is a whole number from 1 to 10. Ratings are weighted toward recent opinion, then combined with a Bayesian prior centred at 6.5 that pulls offices with few ratings toward the middle. This stops a single enthusiastic rating from producing a perfect score.
Do cost, milk, or machine type affect the score?
No. Cost, milk options, machine type, and visitor access are recorded as facts and exposed as filters. They never change the score. An office cannot improve its ranking by making coffee free or by buying a more expensive machine.
What do I need to rate an office?
Nothing but the office and about thirty seconds. Rating is open to everyone, there is nothing to fill in beyond the score itself, and every rating counts. A private cookie keeps your contributions together on the device you used, so you can update or withdraw a rating later.
How does Deskbrew stop fake ratings?
Several controls work together. Before a rating is saved, the exact office must be confirmed against a server-issued token bound to that office and contributor. Rate limits apply both to the contributor and to a hashed network key, so clearing cookies does not reset them. Every contribution passes a human verification check. Ratings that match manipulation patterns, such as one contributor rating several unrelated companies within half an hour, are held out of scoring for review.
Why is an office marked provisional?
A provisional office has too few ratings for its score to be treated as settled. The score is still shown, because contributing should visibly do something, but the office is excluded from official rankings until it reaches the confidence threshold.
Is my rating anonymous?
Yes. Contributor identity is never shown on a public page. Reactions appear without a name attached, and client network addresses are stored only as a keyed hash used for abuse counting, never in raw form.
Can a company change or remove its score?
No. Company representatives can suggest corrections to factual details such as the address, machine, milk options, or visitor access. Taste scores cannot be edited, disputed away, or purchased.
What counts as one office?
One physical office location is one entry. A company with three buildings in a city has three entries, each with its own score, because the coffee is usually different in each. Company-wide figures exist but are always secondary to the location.
Which cities does Deskbrew cover?
Frankfurt is the first launch market. Anyone can add a missing office, which enters a moderation queue before it appears in public rankings.
How current is the information?
Every factual attribute carries a confirmation date and a freshness state, shown on the office page. Ratings are weighted toward recent opinion, so a score follows the current coffee programme rather than an office's historical reputation.
Is Deskbrew a Glassdoor for office coffee?
That is the shortest accurate description. As on an employer-review site, the ratings come from the people who are actually there, nobody needs the company's permission to post one, and the result is public. The difference is the scope: salary, management, and workload belong on those other sites, while here the entire subject is what comes out of the machine.
Do you cover cafes, coffee shops, or roasteries?
No, and that is deliberate. Every city already has good guides to where you can buy a coffee. Nobody has ranked the coffee people drink at work, so every Deskbrew entry is a workplace. A cafe inside an office building is listed only where it is that office's own coffee for the people who work there.
How do I find the best office coffee in my city?
Open the city ranking. It orders every ranking-eligible office in that city by taste, and cost, milk, machine type, and visitor access work as filters on top of that order, so you can narrow it to offices open to visitors or serving oat milk without losing the ranking. The map shows the same data geographically if you would rather look at one neighbourhood.
How do I find which office of my company has the best coffee?
The company page collects every mapped office of one company, each with its own score, so a company with six sites shows six numbers rather than one average. Coffee is almost always a per-building decision — different machines, suppliers, and cleaning rotas — which is why the location, not the logo, is the unit Deskbrew ranks.
Is a portafilter better than an automatic machine in an office?
Not on its own. A traditional espresso machine has both the higher ceiling and the higher demands: it rewards an office where someone dials in the grind and cleans the group head, and punishes one where nobody does. A bean-to-cup machine gives a consistent, unremarkable cup for far less attention. Which one wins is an empirical question, and machine type is recorded as a fact precisely so the ratings can answer it instead of the specification sheet.
Is paid office coffee better than free office coffee?
Cost is not a quality signal in either direction, and it never enters the score. Offices that charge sometimes fund better beans and a service contract; offices that give coffee away sometimes buy more carefully to control volume. Filter by cost on the map, or read the free-versus-paid comparison, and judge it from how the two groups actually rate.
Is this serious, or is it a joke?
It is a fun idea that happens to produce real information, and what you do with that information is up to you. Some people settle an argument about whether the building across the street really does have better coffee. Some show a falling score to whoever signs the coffee contract. Most just look. Because ratings are anonymous, structured, and weighted, the comparison is something you can see objectively rather than assume — and a piece of feedback that is easier to act on than a complaint in the kitchen.
Can I check the coffee at a company before applying for a job?
Yes. Search the company and choose the actual office location. Deskbrew rates individual workplaces rather than the employer overall.
Can an employer use its Deskbrew score on a careers page?
Yes. Scores are public and can be linked or shared, but the employer cannot edit or buy the rating.
Can employees use Deskbrew to ask for better coffee?
Yes. A public score and structured feedback can make the problem easier to discuss, but Deskbrew does not contact employers or demand changes.
Does free office coffee count as an employee benefit?
It is better described as a workplace perk than compensation. Deskbrew records whether coffee is free separately from taste.
What makes office coffee good?
Fresh beans, a suitable grind, good water, clean equipment, well-handled milk and regular maintenance matter more than buying the most expensive machine.
Read the office coffee setup guide