What's new in the archive

Changelog

A running record of meaningful, user-visible changes to this archive. Features added, taxonomies renamed, data backfilled, designs reworked. Newest first.

  1. Caramelly pours the new Discovery menu

    • Content
    • Data

    Added the Caramelly Coffee Roasters Discovery menu: four light roasts, three of them from Ratnagiri Estate in Chikmagalur. Pink Bloom is an SLN795 natural, while the Ratnagiri lots are all Catuai — a strawberry-fermented microlot, a jasmine-led microlot, and a watermelon-fermented Fruit Bomb. Each coffee carries pack photos, tasting notes and varietals read off the tins, plus elevations, prices and a link to buy from Caramelly's own shop. Caramelly joins the archive as a new roaster with its logo, bio and links.

  2. The menu pouring right now no longer shows a made-up end date

    • Design
    • Data

    Until now the newest menu displayed an end date we had guessed at, roughly six weeks out, because every menu was required to have one. That date was never real. The current menu now simply shows the day it started, and only picks up a genuine end date once the following menu arrives to close it out. Menus that have already finished still show their full run as before.

  3. Sensory profiles now match what the bag actually says

    • Feature
    • Data

    The sensory profile on a coffee page can now show bitterness, which had no place to live before, and can read back a roaster's wording directly when a bag describes a coffee in words such as "medium-high acidity" rather than with a row of dots. The Blue Note has been corrected: it had been showing full marks for acidity and sweetness, which its label never claimed — the bag reads bitter 2 of 5, sweet 3.5 of 5 and acidic 3 of 5, and the page now reflects that. Elevations printed as a range on the bag are also shown exactly as stated instead of being approximated.

  4. Find a coffee at its roaster, straight from its page

    • Content
    • Data

    Sixty-seven coffees now link out to their own listing on the roaster's website, so you can read the roaster's own write-up or buy a bag without hunting for it. Along the way many of those pages gained details lifted from the roaster's shop: cupping scores, prices, pack weights, elevations, producers and varietals, filled in only where we didn't already have them. Hundreds of new product photos and label artworks came across too, sitting alongside the pack shots already in the archive. We only ever pull from the coffee's actual roaster, so a coffee that shares its name with another roaster's release never picks up the wrong details.

  5. Roaster pages get links and a bio

    • Content
    • Design
    • Data

    Every roaster now carries its website and Instagram link, a short factual bio, and a profile logo on its detail page, so each roaster reads as a proper introduction rather than just a name with a list of coffees beneath it. Where a roaster's logo was missing it was pulled from their Instagram profile; better existing logos were kept as they were.

  6. Home Baristas of India, picked by the brewers themselves

    • Content
    • Feature
    • Data

    Added the Home Baristas of India Discovery menu: twelve Indian coffees, each chosen and championed by a home barista at our Crescent Road rooftop event. Every coffee now carries a "Picked by" credit that names the barista and shares their own note on why they chose it, alongside pack photos, origins, processes, elevations, lot details, and tasting notes read straight off the bags. The lineup spans Arabica, Robusta, Liberica and a rare Excelsa, from a watermelon co-ferment to a wild Nagaland washed peaberry.

  7. Tap any photo to see it full screen

    • Feature
    • Design

    Coffee and menu photos now open full screen when you tap or click them. Move between multiple shots by swiping on a phone or using the side arrows on a larger screen, with dots showing how many photos there are and which one you are on. A tap on the X closes it. Works across phones, tablets and desktops.

  8. Clearer scroll cues on the home "Now Pouring" card

    • Design

    On phones, the row of coffees inside the Now Pouring card now fades only on the side that still has more to scroll: no fade at the very start on the left, a fade on the right, both while in the middle, and the reverse once you reach the end. A small cue that makes it obvious the list slides sideways, and where it begins and ends.

  9. Aramse Discovery, and Salawara finds its home

    • Content
    • Data

    Added the D-01 Aramse "Limited Editions" Discovery menu: four coffees spanning Aramse's Edition 1 and Edition 2 releases, plus an exclusive pre-release pour of the Vibrant Edition 3 from Ratnagiri Estate. The released coffees carry pack photos, producer names, elevations, and brewing pro-tips pulled from Aramse's own shop. Separately, Salawara Estate was moved on the origin map to its real home in Belur, near Sakleshpur, which corrects the pin and region for every coffee that sources from it across the archive. Its estate page now links to the estate's own Instagram.

  10. Copy pass: typos and Oxford commas

    • Content

    Fixed some typos and updated some copy across the site. Em-dashes pruned from the home page, about page, meta descriptions, and a handful of UI labels. Oxford commas added where lists were missing them. Instagram captions on menu pages were left untouched, since those are pulled verbatim from the original posts.

  11. Per-page social cards

    • Feature
    • Design

    Every coffee, menu, and the coasters page now ships with its own custom Open Graph image when shared on Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Slack, or Discord. Menu cards inherit the dominant colour of their theme image. Coffees with pack photos show the photo in full; coffees without one fall back to a typographic card tinted by their process category (natural, washed, honey, anaerobic). The coasters page got a 3×3 polaroid wall pulled from nine evenly-spaced coasters across the catalogue. The default site card was regenerated to reflect the latest counts.

  12. Filter and sort upgrades

    • Feature

    Added a species filter (arabica, robusta, liberica, blend) to the coffee archive, plus a custom Sort pill that sits alongside the other filters. Process names now display in their canonical form everywhere on the site.

  13. Coaster gallery, fully populated

    • Content

    64 new coasters arrived (33 from Shibani's personal library and 31 more from Vishal's iPhone batch), bringing the total to 135 catalogued. Every page load reshuffles the gallery so repeat visitors see different orderings. The Hoffmann coaster (#083) stays pinned as the gallery's hero. Photo credits are now attached per coaster.

  14. /coasters launches

    • Feature

    New gallery page indexing the collectable coasters Nerlu drops with menu rotations. The initial 71 photos came from Vishal's personal collection, accumulated over years of regular visits. Square-cropped photos with photographer credit per coaster, plus JSON-LD ImageGallery markup so search engines understand the page as a gallery rather than a list of standalone images.

  15. Performance pass, 79 MB lighter

    • Performance

    Downsized oversized coffee and menu photos across the archive. About 79 MB came off the page payload. Open Graph image switched from PNG to JPEG so Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook all render the share preview cleanly without the alpha-channel quirks PNG triggers on those surfaces.

  16. "Farms" becomes "Estates"

    • Design
    • Content

    Renamed the user-facing taxonomy from "Farms" to "Estates", URL paths included. Indian specialty coffee labels overwhelmingly say "estate" on the bag, so the rename matches what readers actually encounter on packs and at cafés.

  17. Curator pairings on coffee pages

    • Feature

    Coffee detail pages can now embed a music or text pairing curated by a guest. The first pairing, on the Blue Note retail release, points at a Bill Evans Trio track. The kind of context that turns a coffee from a list entry into a reading.

  18. Coffeeverse Discovery and Blue Note retail

    • Content

    Added the D-01 Coffeeverse × Riverdale Estate Discovery post and the standalone Blue Note retail release as the archive's first non-menu retail entry.

  19. Self-hosted typography

    • Performance
    • Design

    Removed the Google Fonts dependency in favour of a curated system font stack. Pages no longer make a third-party font request, so they paint immediately and behave the same offline.

  20. Expanded "Journey So Far"

    • Feature
    • Design

    About page now carries distribution charts (roast levels, process families, species), featured cards for the top roaster / estate / tasting note / varietal, a flavour cloud, and editorial blocks contextualising each section. The subtitle was also corrected to say this archive is unofficial.

  21. Per-menu image tint

    • Design

    Menu cards on the home page, the menus index, and inside menu detail pages now pull a colour palette from the menu's primary image and tint the surrounding card. Each menu visually carries the character of its theme image rather than sitting on a uniform card surface. The palette extraction runs at build time and caches per image fingerprint.

  22. Roaster identity pass

    • Design
    • Data

    Every roaster now has a logo on its detail page. Duplicate roaster records (Genetics and Koffie Genetics, the Quick Brown Fox split, and several minor variants) were merged into canonical entries.

  23. Branding: wordmark, OG image, favicons, sitemap

    • Design

    The "ner.lu archive" wordmark went into the header and footer in Expressa Heavy. The site got its first Open Graph card and a complete favicon set (16, 32, 48, 180, 192, 512). Sitemap published for search engines.

  24. Origin map and multi-origin display

    • Feature
    • Data

    Coffee origin pins now resolve to the most granular known location (estate when known, otherwise region, otherwise state). A polygon-based India map renders origins on coffee detail pages. Coffees that span multiple origins display each one separately rather than collapsing them.

  25. Discovery and missed-post backfill

    • Content

    Thirty older Instagram posts that pre-dated the archive's tracking were retroactively added, with bag-label fields populated wherever the original posts contained the data. The archive now reaches further back into Nerlu's pre-2024 era.

  26. Per-page search

    • Feature

    Search bar added to the menus and roasters index pages so you can filter inline rather than navigating to a separate search route. The standalone /search page was retired.

  27. Mobile nav, active highlights, editorial intros

    • Design

    Header gets a hamburger menu on narrow viewports and the active page is highlighted in the nav. The home page now opens with an editorial intro above the "Now pouring" rail, and coffee cards in lists carry roaster name plus state of origin so they read as cards, not just titles.

  28. Light mode

    • Feature

    Added the "Warm Paper" light theme alongside the default dark mode. Choice persists in localStorage, so the site remembers what you picked.

  29. First public release

    • Feature

    Site scaffolded on Astro 5 with TypeScript and Tailwind. Content collections, schemas, BaseLayout, and the Phase 1 pages (home, menus, archive, coffees, roasters) all shipped together as the archive's first usable build. The initial dataset was populated from Vishal's personal archive of coffee photos shot at Nerlu over the years, with each pack label transcribed into the bridge YAML one entry at a time.