Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

A long time ago we decided that coffee maps were an odd Internet fetish. Over the years we’ve been approached by people with special Internet maps APIs (call it Internet software for short), requests for Google maps views, and people building just about every coffee map variant under the sun. More recently, we have the [...]

We wrap up our brief series on Seattle’s espresso and coffee culture with a few observations. First, it had been way, way too long since our last visit. Twelve years in fact. Which is all the more ridiculous given the kind of coffee tourists we’ve become. It was 15 years ago that I attended graduate [...]

Last night we attended a quasi-annual Portuguese wine tasting event sponsored by ViniPortugal. We’ve attended this event a few times prior (last at the Palace Hotel in 2008), and this was by far the worst: completely cramped quarters atop the 32nd floor of the Westin St. Francis, vendors who ran out of wine and bailed [...]

This past year, The Atlantic magazine has been no stranger to the subject of coffee. They finish out the year on the topic of coffee tourists: Coffee Worth Traveling For – The Atlantic Food Channel. We’ve always used the phrase coffee tourist in a much more derogatory context — e.g., “kopi luwak is a gag [...]

MSN City Guides recently joined the ever-popular year-end parade of Internet-friendly Top 10 lists: America’s Best Coffee – 1 – MSN City Guides. As if to show Bon Appétit that they, too, can list their favorites without the bother of any supporting criteria, MSN’s editors also took an early holiday and let two additional nominees [...]

Bon Appétite‘s January 2010 issue steps into the fray by naming their top 10 boutique coffee shops: Top 10 Boutique Coffee Shops: In the Magazine : bonappetit.com. Making their list is SF’s Four Barrel Coffee. But before anyone gets too excited, it’s worth noting that Bon Appétit is a sausage factory for Internet-friendly “Top 10″ [...]

We’ve posted before about Melbourne’s claim as the coffee capital of Australia. In addition to the Melbourne Coffee Review Web site we noted back in 2007 (in operation since 2004), there is now a printed guide to Melbourne’s top 100 coffee shops with the title Melbourne Coffee Review: Crema of the crop – Epicure – [...]

We’re rather shameless about our love for the espresso and cafés in Torino, Italy. So we could not pass on today’s travel article in The Guardian (UK): Lose the froth: Turin’s best cafes | Travel | The Guardian. So why do we love the espresso and cafés in Torino so much? To start with: grand [...]

A few weeks ago we received the latest (and tenth) edition of the annual Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso for 2010. It is the closest thing in print we’ve seen to our Web site reviews, and we’ve generally found it indispensable when traveling Italy in search of good espresso. (We last reviewed the 2007 edition.) [...]

To the uninitiated, CoffeeRatings.com might look more like a horse racing tip sheet than a coffee Web site. But there are very good reasons why we’ve gone through the effort to quantify things. Just look at the chaos that can ensue when you don’t follow a system nor a simple baseline set of evaluation criteria: [...]