Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Opening in 2011, Jane on Fillmore took over the former Bittersweet space and changed a few things with the design. There’s an area dedicated to baking and baked goods in the back. There’s still limited seating upstairs, now just above a mounted buffalo head with an SF Giants cap. Otherwise it has retained its sunny [...]

The sad state of home espresso machines is a topic we’ve tried to avoid for long stretches. After our last depressing installment in 2009, we’ve been blissfully ignorant — ratcheting up the solid-but-rarely-outstanding shot pulls on our relatively decent home espresso setup of a Gaggia G106 Factory manual lever machine and a Mazzer Mini grinder. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week brought us yet another coffee article about wine analogies and making the “perfect” (groan) cup: The Art of the Perfect Cup of Coffee | CulturePOP | Ingredients for an Artful Life. What was different about this one is it consisted of an interview with reigning WBC champ Michael Phillips of Chicago’s Intelligentsia. In [...]

This neighborhood coffee bar had been unusually hyped in the local presses, and on Facebook, for more than six months before it opened. This in a town where online foodie blogs make daily fodder of vacant, stripped-to-the-studs restaurant and café spaces with indefinite opening dates slated sometime before the next presidential administration. We can attribute [...]

Thanks to friend of this blog, Shawn Steiman, for pointing out this somewhat amusing article from today’s New York Times: Loving Coffee Without Being a Drip – NYTimes.com. In something of an ode to the Mr. Coffee automatic filter drip machine, the author — Times food critic, Frank Bruni — laments the many overly precious [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald published a curious fad-contrarian article under the subhed of “Espresso lovers are fighting the siphon and filter revolution”: Shots fired in retaliation. Now the idea of a “siphon and filter revolution” is still a bit silly to us, given that siphon brewing has been around since the 1830s and filter coffee [...]

Now that we’ve been told Seattle espresso is passé — with self-proclaimed Third Wave aficionados holding their nose at the (former) Queen City’s “Oh So Last Wave” reputation — we recently visited a variety of Seattle espresso bars. This is the first post of a coming series on Seattle cafés. We hope this series will [...]