Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Now that we’ve caught your attention with the sensationalist title, we’ve had a thought that has been milling around in our heads for quite a while. All this talk about a supposed Third Wave in quality coffee (it truly is that hard for us to restrain our contempt for that term) seems to have coincided [...]

We’ve previously posted about the phenomenon of well-heeled consumers paying for the privilege of performing manual labor in food production that our country could otherwise only get illegal immigrants to do. But here’s a new twist on the continued glamorization of the food service industry — yesterday Microsoft announced a new video game for the [...]

While I’ll be checking out Barista Coffee in India, Minneapolis will be hosting this year’s U.S. Barista Championship during the SCAA conference this weekend. Yesterday, the host city’s hometown paper, the Star Tribune, published a rather lengthy article on the event: The great barista battle is brewing. It’s a story that’s been covered dozens, if [...]

Yesterday Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World aired a broadcast on the Italian espresso: Espresso | PRI’s The World. While every news outlet in America was regurgitating Starbucks‘ publicity over their token three-hour store closure for employee training, reporter David Leveille took a different approach by interviewing the art of the espresso from a distinctly [...]

One of the worst-kept secrets of the past few years is that McDonald’s has been trying to get into the espresso business. Today, news services such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that McDonald’s plans to launch coffee bars with the new employee position of “barista”: McDonald’s coffee bars to take on [...]

If Peet’s Coffee & Tea has been a slow-growth contrast to Starbucks‘ cancerous proliferation in recent years, Intelligentsia‘s expansion has been deliberately glacial. And why not? You get big, you get less selective about your coffee growers and suppliers. You start accepting employees with fewer skills and less passion about truly good coffee. And how’s [...]

Seattle’s Coffee Fest trade show ended yesterday. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article announcing the winners of its “Millrock Free Pour Latte Art competition” (isn’t that a mouthful?): Artistic cup of joe brings home $5,000 prize. Top honors and $5,000 of prize money went to Layla Emily Osberg of Vancouver, BC’s Blenz Coffee — where [...]

I’ve been planning another road trip to Torino this October — my first since 2004. The wine and food are always excellent, the tourists are hard to come by (you can have an Italian city of almost a million people to yourself), Juventus is back in Serie A (and yesterday started the season off smashingly), [...]

Jack Hanna of Canberra, Australia is the reigning world champion of latte art — at least according to the recent World Latte Art Championships held in Belgium this past May: Aussie cappuccino king says coffee art not all froth | Lifestyle | Living | Reuters. Australia has won the title two years running. (No surprise, [...]

The votes have been tallied and a huge round of congratulations are in order. Props to James Hoffman, of La Spaziale UK Ltd. and jimseven fame (jimseven.com has linked over here often), for winning the 2007 World Barista Championship (WBC) today in Tokyo: Briton is crowned world espresso ‘barista’ champion at Tokyo contest (International Herald [...]