Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

The story of coffee at Specialty’s Café & Bakery reflects the story of San Francisco’s consumer tastes for retail coffee. In the beginning, there was Faema + Prebica — and it was weak A decade ago, Specialty’s ran a small chain of bakery/cafés with coffee service areas. Some locations, like this one on Pine St., [...]

икониSince we’ve long tired of reading about Stumpgate, it’s time to change the coffee conversation. So instead of the global growth and ubiquity of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, we turn our attention to something closer to home: the growth and ubiquity of Blue Bottle coffee. This relatively new neighborhood café caters to local UCSF medical students [...]

Here in SF, we’re sometimes way too busy holding our noses because a coffee shop doesn’t use Blue Bottle or Fair Trade certified coffee. (In our personal case, sometimes it’s just too few places that use Barefoot.) To put things a little in perspective, here’s a story today from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Police bust [...]

Earlier this week, KRUPS, that bastion of great coffee, announced the winners of their National “Cup O’ Joe Awards”: Revealed: Nation’s best coffee shops – This Just In – Budget Travel. Now if only this announcement had anything legitimately to do with good coffee. Heck, if only KRUPS had anything legitimately to do with good [...]

Taking up the space that was formerly Daniel Creamery and its cheese production, the Summit has tall ceilings in a wide open space converted for café and art space use. The main seating area is littered with rectangular tables and chairs with plenty of wall outlets and laptop zombies — making you feel like you [...]

Three years ago we identified something we called the low budget, ghetto chic conceptual art cafe — the said concept being consumers having to pay for full-priced espresso with the hipster privileges of having zero amenities. Last year some ad wizard decided these borderline coffee favelas should be called “coffee pop ups” (also formerly known [...]

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 [...]

A viral video is going around these days on “The Coffee Wars of San Francisco”. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek with its Ken-Burns-documentary-style humor — though that largely reminds us of how much Ken Burns can lull us to sleep like a bottle of brandy. While the mockumentary oscillates between the mildly funny and the painfully [...]

San Francisco has elevated NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) to an art form. We can be such petty, whiny bitches in this city when it comes to the realities of business and commerce. It’s a complete wonder that anybody is allowed to make a living at all in this town — let alone that [...]

Opening in Oct. 2009, James Freeman finally established a spacious company headquarters home for his ever-growing Bay Area coffee empire here in Jack London Square. They host a surprisingly small café for retail coffee service. There’s several tall stools and tables for outdoor seating along Webster St., and indoors there is barely a four-person window [...]