An Aeropress under test (image credit: Hips Social)

Unbiased Objective Testing At Every Level

When it comes to testing everything in the world of coffee, our goal is a simple one, to provide you dear reader with our honest thoughts and opinions about any and all products that land in our shop. 

Independence and honest journalism is critical to what we believe every good media outlet should aspire to. It’s something we take incredibly seriously here, and we aim to ensure every review is done fairly, and to a high standard with multiple perspectives and opinions taken into consideration.

Our dedicated team of baristas, coffee-lovers, journalists, and hospitality junkies have decades of experience between them, and have been hand-picked and trained specifically to provide you with the best information and insight possible, ensuring you make the right pick, when you want to go out and buy everything from your next bag of coffee, to the latest Aeropress, espresso bar and everything in between.

You can visit our About Us page to find out more about the team, and why we do what we do.

Content Clarity & Guarantee

• We never take payment for product reviews, under any circumstance.
• We ensure multiple staff try and test each product before a review is written.
• Where possible, we use quantitative testing to analyze every product we have in.
• We give you our direct and honest opinions each and every time.
• We test each product for a minimum of two weeks either at home or in our shops.
• We tell you what we want to say, not what manufacturers want to see.
  
  

Review Scores

All of our reviews utilize an “out of 10” scoring system. We like to keep it simple for you, and ensure good products are easily identifiable. The higher the score, the better the product. Each item gets rated across a number of criteria, covering everything from build quality, price, features, durability, and performance along with any other categories specifically chosen by the Editorial Team for that specific device.

• 1: Not worth buying, avoid at all costs, possibly dangerous.
• 2: Isn’t going to harm you, slightly better, but still isn’t worth your time.
• 3: Massively overpriced or doesn’t provide you with anything it’s meant to.
• 4: Overpriced and just about does what it’s meant to do out of the box.
• 5: It functions as a product as intended, but has no bells and whistles, or attractive pricing.
• 6: Slightly above average, performs ok, priced ok, one minor positive element to it.
• 7: Pretty good, getting into the realms of considering, price is competitive, but performance is average.
• 8: Worth considering, generally good performance, let down in the finer details or build quality.
• 9: Top-tier product and above. Outstanding performance, great build quality, and a reasonable price.
• 10: Almost impossible to achieve, perfect on every level, from price to performance to build quality.
   

Awards

On the odd occasion, if a product is particularly impressive, we may also give it an award as well. There's three total that we have at our disposal.

 

Editor's Choice award

This is given out to only the very best of products. If a product scores a 9 or a 10 and exceeds on multiple fronts, beating the competition or providing unprecedented value, then it'll likely receive one of these bad boys.

 

Best of the Best award

If it's the very best in a given product class, then it'll win our BotB award. Maybe it's a little niche, maybe it's quite unique in how it operates, maybe it trounces the competition in every field but costs quite a lot, then the Best of the Best award is likely a good candidate.

 

Best Value award

Is this the best product in the world? Perhaps not, but it's also 50% cheaper than the next similarly classed product. If that's the case, our Best Value award will be right on target.

Quick Looks

Every now and then, whether we're at a show or special press event, there may be a product we want to report on that we won't have our usual two-week timescale to test it with. In that case, we'll often publish a "Quick Look" review instead.

These articles are exactly what they say on the tin—a quick look by our journalists, their first opinion on a product. Because we can't fully test these products for our allotted time period or to the high standard we expect, we won't give an initial score on the review itself. However, we will endeavor to get the product in for full testing and update the article appropriately at a later date.

Supported By You

Hips editorial content is directly supported by you, our readers. Whenever you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission through various affiliate programs. We always ensure this doesn't impact our editorial integrity in any way; after all, reputation and respect is everything in this industry, and we're driven first and foremost to provide you with detailed and accurate product recommendations no matter what.

Still, we do need to cover our own costs and pay our editorial team, so we do generate revenue in a few ways. We often use affiliate links in our product reviews and "best of" guides. 

Additionally, every now and then we may publish an advertorial (editorial paid for content) and sponsored content. If this is the case, the content will be clearly marked as sponsored or promoted, and you'll know exactly what content is editorial and which isn't, immediately.

Why Trust Us?

No outside body, entity, company, or person influences how or what we review here at Hips. The same goes for all of our buying guides and product recommendations. All written content in our editorial articles remains independent, and anything that's scored in any way has in no way been paid for.

We have a crack team of editorial specialists with years of experience in the industry. They've dealt with and butted heads with all manner of company execs, and marketing sleuths trying to do exactly that.

Occasionally we may very well take trips out to shows and events to see the latest and greatest coffee and hospitality gear; however, we never let that affect our editorial content in any way shape or form. It may, however, be the only way we can get access to these products or test them effectively.

Our review samples themselves are a mixture of both bought and loaned items, provided for by the companies in question; once again, we never let this affect our content in any manner. If the product performs poorly, you can bet your last coffee bean, and we'll let you know about it. Additionally, we endeavor to return all products to their respective brands at the end of the loan agreement, as stipulated.