Posted by TheShot on 14 Mar 2011 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew
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 [...]
[view full post]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 06 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 04 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 01 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 30 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Roasting
Last week we wrote about how coffee, like food, has become a primary form of consumer entertainment. We also mentioned recent experiences at newer coffee bars that have felt, well, “manipulative and artificial.” This concern over what seems real might sound trivial, but it’s at the foundation of a great deal of consumer behavior and [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 21 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
Four years ago we posted about our disappointment over high-end restaurants that offered plenty of options for tea but only one for coffee. It’s as if these celebrated houses of distinguished taste decided that coffee had all the nuance and variety of unleaded gasoline — and it showed in the product they served. And when [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 26 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Roasting
In the transitioning Cape Town neighborhood of Woodstock, which out-Missions the Mission, this espresso bar and roaster perhaps looks like no other you’ve seen before. Located inside the newly-art-conscious Old Biscuit Mill, this small space is a pristine, stark black-&-white-themed coffee lab that exudes meticulous organization. The Old Biscuit Mill is known in town for [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 04 May 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
We honestly don’t like repeating ourselves, but we will anyway. No, this has nothing to do with the Cafe Grumpy $12 cup of coffee scuttlebutt going around — where New Yorkers once again find something in their backyard and therefore presume they must have invented it. (Curiously, this came up one month after CNN reported [...]
[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 [...]
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