Posted by TheShot on 11 Nov 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Machine
The name is “Ma’velous”. We’re not sure if this is a New Yorker thing — like when Monday Night Football legend, Al Michaels, tries to pronounce the ‘h’ in the word “huge.” But the owner, Phillip Ma, is a self-fashioned coffee geek with apparently enough money for high-end coffeemaking toys but no real prior training [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 25 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Roasting
This past weekend, Barefoot Coffee Roasters celebrated their seventh anniversary. While the San Francisco Coffee Wars have clearly overlooked the South Bay, we’ve frequently traced some of our favorite coffee experiences back to this small microroaster and their tiny chain of cafés. Besides their flagship café in Santa Clara, they have recently expanded to a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 21 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Roasting
This downtown espresso bar and roaster was co-founded by Carl Wessel and former Origin roaster, Judd Francis. It’s a tiny, tiny spot with room for only three stools at the espresso bar, two stools along the shop window counter, and two inside chairs. Inside there are worn, wooden floors, artsy touches like cacti and odd [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 May 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Machine, Roasting
This Stumptown outlet opened in 2007. It arguably first represented the Portland chain’s global ambitions. At the time, there was much consternation among Seattlites about an interloper in their heart of their Capitol Hill coffee culture (not to mention the Northwest rivalry that ensued). Stumptown even opened up roasting operations in town. But things haven’t [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 23 May 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Machine, Roasting
We continue our series on Seattle cafés with a visit to another another of the three V’s in town: this time it’s Caffé Vita in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. This combination café and roaster is one of the bigger entities in this coffee-rich neighborhood. It has the bold Caffé Vita neon signage out front — [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 20 May 2010 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Café Society, Foreign Brew
We continue our series on Seattle coffee culture with a visit to a Victrola Coffee — one of the three “V’s” Seattleites refer to when seeking decent espresso. This location is the original Victrola, though the name here emphasizes their artistic roots and continued interests. It’s an older establishment that exudes some 1950s classicism — [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 17 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, CoffeeRatings.com, Local Brew, Quality Issues
Frog Hollow Farm reserves a rather anonymous place in the retail coffee history of San Francisco, but it was a watershed for the coffee quality in this city. As much as we roll our eyes at the hackneyed and abused third wave term, by many definitions (theirs, and definitely not ours) this was SF’s first [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 10 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Roasting
We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 05 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Quality Issues
This corner café looks more at home in Tucson than SF: it’s akin to adobe construction. To think this was the former home of the Octavia Lounge piano bar/cabaret. Past a heavy wooden door and faux totem pole on entry, it has beat up, reddish wooden floors, white stone walls, beat up tables that look [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 07 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Machine
The former One World Cafe needed a serious upgrade, and this is it. Gone are the beat-up furniture and odd house plants that made this space look like a medical marijuana co-op in aging neglect. The place now looks more like a sushi bar, with clean, angular lines, dark and solid colors, nicer wood floors, [...]
[view full post]
Recent Posts