Coffee types, you may have been auto-tweeted by a bot that has been floating around for some time now. It’s the Cultivar Awareness Bot, a snarky and pun-obsessed Twitter feed whose only purpose is to correct improper usage of the noun ‘varietal.’ That’s right – Bourbon or Pacamara or SL-69 are not, in fact, your favorite varietals; according to this grammatical robot (and his prestigious list of supporting sources), they are your favorite varieties, or if you still needed to sound erudite, your favorite cultivars.
This pedantic project was obviously created by some total wine dork(s) – serving as proof that wine geeks are trumping us on the creative front – but the Awareness Bot does not aim its digital huff-and-puff at viticulture alone. He / she / it is more than willing to step in and tut-tut the usage of coffee tweeters.
From the Cultivar Awareness Bot FAQ:
You’re clearly a wine bot, but you responded to my tweet about coffee.
Remember, I’m a simple bot. There are times when I can figure out that you’re tweeting about coffee (or olive oil, or chocolate, for that matter), but I’m not some fancy-schmancy AI program that can somehow grok the meaning of your tweet. I can’t tell that a half caf pumpkin soy Venti refers to coffee (if very dubiously). That said, the coffee world, too, is rife with misuse of the word “varietal,” and I am grateful for my many coffee geek followers. (Those who talk about “varietals” of
Don’t you have better things to do with your time?
You forget I’m a bot. I have all the time in the world.
Cultivar Awareness Bot, you’re the best non-human Twitter user since the Bronx Zoo’s Cobra.
