Posted by TheShot on 09 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew
We’d apologize for the lack of postings this past month, but that’s partly the result of good editing. The trouble is that we typically board up our windows and hide from most coffee blogs this time of year, as most become inundated by insipid annual round-ups of coffee gift ideas to help cash in on [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 17 Sep 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
We used to write more regularly about the steady stream of meaningless, unscientific coffee polls that frequently fill the pages of magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. We got tired of writing incessant rants about how the polls were poorly constructed and lacked any stated criteria nor methodology, and most assuredly you all certainly tired of [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 29 Jul 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew, Machine, Roasting
Shockingly, it’s taken us this long to make it to Portland, Oregon — considered by many to be ground zero (no café name pun intended) of American coffee culture. And if you’re going to start sampling the offerings in Portland, it only makes sense that you start with the legendary Stumptown Coffee Roasters. This despite [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 12 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends
The New York Times published an article this week (due in the NY Times Magazine tomorrow) from its coffee beat regular, Oliver Strand: Japan’s Pour-Over Coffee Wins Converts – NYTimes.com. It’s a relatively effective trend piece — dealing more with pop culture and a sort of social anthropology than anything it says about coffee. But [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 13 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew, Roasting, Robusta
Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal features an article on the Lisbon espresso, the bica: The Best Cafes in Lisbon – WSJ.com. It touches on Lisboeta coffee culture — e.g., drinking many shots each day at the local pasteleria (a sort of pastry shop/bar); a dependence on slower roasts, good quality coffee from Brazil, but also a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew
As 2010 heads towards a close, we reflect on some of the more interesting coffee bars we’ve stumbled across for the first time in the past year. Cape Town’s Origin Coffee Roasting is clearly a new global favorite. Closer to home, the opening of Ma’velous promises a new evolutionary direction for the coffee bar. But [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
Today’s post comes directly from the Friday Comic Relief Department. Because we enjoy sarcastic humor, and are frequently guilty of it ourselves, we bring you: The Five Types of Morning Coffee Crazies (And How to %#$@ with Them) | Points in Case. (Title edited for vulgarity.) A rather comic rant on some of the obsessive-compulsive [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 31 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 22 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew, Machine
Not to be confused with Cento, which is decidedly at the opposite end of the amenity scale, this is a classically pretty café at the rear entrance of the elegant Fairmont Hotel. It caters primarily to hotel tourists — many of whom come from around the globe and get a little homesick for something other [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 06 May 2009 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Starbucks
An Op-Ed piece in Monday’s Washington Post noted the curious phenomenon of local culture that is exported, reinterpreted abroad, and then imported back again. The article’s topic was the wildly received recent openings of Starbucks cafés in cities such as Warsaw and Prague — with the backdrop of their centuries-old coffeehouse culture traditions: Anne Applebaum [...]
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