Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today’s The Korea Herald published a thought-provoking (if not debatable) piece about one-time Korea Barista Champion, Jeon Yong: Barista bringing coffee back to basics. Internal divisions within the national barista association prevented him from representing South Korea at the 2007 WBC in Tokyo, and he dismisses the notion that a training course can make one [...]

Tags: Barista, barista_championships, black_gold, brightness_bomb, coffee_chains, italian_coffee, quality_standards, third_wave

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Today’s London Times published something of a book review of a new four-volume series, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (Markman Ellis, editor): Smell the coffee – Times Online. It’s a long-winded article. But compared to the British tolerance for long-winded, academic tomes (it clocks in at a whopping 1,840 pages), the article is a walk in the [...]

Tags: black_gold, cafe_customers, cafe_society, coffee_history, fair_trade, london_cafes, london_coffee

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An article in yesterday’s Dublin Independent perhaps thought it was exalting the Nespresso espresso. However, it did more to underscore how clueless high-end restaurants are when it comes to espresso quality: The cult of Nespresso – Food & Drink, Lifestyle – Independent.ie. Pre-ground coffee that has aged for weeks in plastic pods since the second [...]

Tags: black_gold, fair_trade, nespresso, nestlé, restaurant_coffee

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Although Fair Trade coffee has been around since the 1980s, it wasn’t until the past couple of years that it received heavy airplay. And unless you’ve been reading a rare opinion, such as this one (or the rare reader of The Economist), you’d think that to question the value and effectiveness of Fair Trade certification [...]

Tags: black_gold, boycott, caffeine, cesar_chavez, coffee_certifications, fair_trade, poverty, social_activism

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BBC World Service radio recently aired a program (make that programme) that tracked a kilogram of coffee from its origins at an Ethiopian coffee farm to retail coffee houses in the Western world: BBC NEWS | Business | Tracking the true cost of coffee. The article mentions the gross imbalance in the distribution of profits [...]

Tags: black_gold, coffee_growers, ethiopian_coffee, fair_trade

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No, I’m not slated as the latest guest movie reviewer for TV’s Ebert & Roeper. (Though I would love to be backstage to witness Robert Roeper tell his guests, “My show. Got that? It’s my show now!”) But last night, KQED aired a coffee-crisis-themed documentary for PBS’s “Indepedent Lens,” titled Black Gold: Independent Lens . [...]

Tags: barista_championships, big_four_coffee, black_gold, caffe_artigiano, coffee_tv, ethiopian_coffee, fair_trade, sammy_piccolo, Starbucks

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Canada’s The Globe and Mail reports that a showing of the documentary film, Black Gold, at the Sundance Film Festival this week motivated a viewer to charity: After seeing coffee doc, Utah doc pays for school. The documentary depicts the disparity between rising coffee prices and declining earnings of the world’s coffee growers.

Tags: black_gold, coffee_growers, fair_trade

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