Posted by TheShot on 15 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
Thanks to tips from some locals and fellow readers, I’ve recently learned that Café Organica has closed down momentarily for renovations. So unlike my initial presumption that Café Organica closed down this past Saturday in order to train for the U.S. Barista Championships, apparently last Saturday was the beginning of a larger project. San Francisco [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 13 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Local Brew, Roasting
Fair Trade, organic coffee drinkers unite! This former Holey Bagel shop has earned an extremely loyal (dare I even suggest “partially blind”?) following in the central Haight district. On their front door, they boast themselves as the #1 coffee shop in San Francisco on the basis of their reviews on Yelp.com. So they must be [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 06 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Local Brew
The Petaluma Hot List As I mentioned in a previous post, the 2006 Western Regional Barista Competition was held in Petaluma over this past weekend. Twenty-two baristas from across California and Hawai’i participated in the annual competition — many for their first time. In addition to bringing out some of the best espresso preparation the [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 05 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Local Brew
A barista championship in Petaluma? Yesterday (Saturday, March 4) I attended my first SCAA barista competition. Held at the Sheraton Sonoma County in Petaluma, the Western Regionals are a competitive prelude to next month’s U.S. Barista Championship. (Petaluma: it’s not just world arm wrestling championships anymore.) The annual Western Regionals covers competitive baristas across California [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 15 Feb 2006 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Home Brew, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
It took a moment for me to dig up an online version, but here it is. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the March 2006 issue of Food & Wine Magazine has a special report on coffee: An Obsessive’s Guide to Coffee | Food & Wine. The editors apparently “spent 410 man-hours tasting 157 coffees [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 28 Jan 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
With my kitchen currently getting the bulldozer (i.e., reconstruction) treatment, home espresso operations have come to a screeching halt. What better time to forage for espresso? Last week I reported that Caffé del Doge opens in Palo Alto, and this morning I decided to pay a visit. This chain of Venetian cafés opened in 2003 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 21 Jan 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
Over the past couple of years, San Francisco has undergone something of a revolution in great espresso. Although the quality revolution has yet to trickle down to the typical corner café, great changes have taken place at the upper eschelon. At the forefront of this revolution is a troika of relative newcomers: Blue Bottle Coffee, [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 18 Jan 2006 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Local Brew
I’ve always said that Eton Tsuno of Café Organica is an espresso visionary. Now his, along with Santa Clara’s Barefoot Coffee Roasters, aren’t the only Bay Area cafés to be famous for offering a choice of coffee bean blends for your espresso. As reported in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (Cetrella owner to bring chowder house [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 29 Nov 2005 | Tagged as: CoffeeRatings.com, Local Brew
A Book About… Local Coffee?! A couple years ago, after caffeinating myself to dangerously jittery levels in my quest to sample and review every espresso served in the city of San Francisco, I had the idea of publishing my findings in a book. Crazy idea? Probably. I had written and published a book before, so [...]
[view full post]
Recent Posts