Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

La Colombe continues to play an interesting role in the modern evolution of consumer coffee tastes. Starting in 1985 in Seattle, co-founders Todd Carmichael and Jean Philippe (JP) Iberti joined forces and decided to set up their idea for a great American roaster in Philadelphia. Which was no small risk, given that Philadelphia isn’t the [...]

The Internet is hardly known as a medium for civil discussion and debate. There are exceptions, of course, but today only the Internet historians will remember when flame wars and childish insults may have briefly raised eyebrows before they became too commonplace to notice anymore. What still raises eyebrows is when there actually is civil [...]

Sometimes life surprises you when what seem like different compartmentalized aspects of it suddenly cross over. Such was the case today where, at one of the more famous technology start-up conferences here in San Francisco, I stumbled across a team building prototype coffeemaking equipment who were performing demonstrations. The company is SF-based Blossom Coffee Inc., [...]

Pardon the sensationalist headline. (Like nobody has ever done that before.) But here’s something from yesterday’s L.A. Weekly on Demitasse, one of the more anticipated new coffeeshops in the L.A. area, that questions/provokes some of the conventional coffee wisdom of the month: Demitasse Will Not Have Pourover Coffee + Other Twists on the Third Wave [...]

It’s a good thing we’re no longer monitoring signs of the impending Apocalypse. But in perhaps yet another sign that quality coffee is at the end of a Golden Age, rumors today of a Stumptown Coffee Roasters buyout: Stumptown Sold Out – The Selling of Stumptown Coffee Roasters – Esquire. Unlike the article’s author (and [...]

This week the pipes and tubes of the Internetz delivered a couple of noteworthy articles on local coffee scenes. The first is a cover story in Portland’s Willamette Week (“Drip City: Everything old is new again in Portland’s coffee scene”). The other is a next-generation rehash of a “favorite coffeehouses” list from the Toronto Star [...]

In what’s starting to look like a Spy-vs-Spy-like dance between a Starbucks acquisition and the unStarbucks set, Starbucks’ Clover Equipment Company’s latest move is the Precision Pour Over: Clover Pour Over « Why Not? Coffee. (Courtesy of Seattle’s Why Not? Coffee.) As we left off in our story, the once-independent Clover Equipment Company made waves [...]

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 [...]

Lately we’ve been thinking about quality coffee’s current obsession with all-things-technology. While there’s arguably more science than art to making good coffee, the current climate seems to have pushed any art aside. It reminds us of civilization at the turn of the 20th century, when society held a common belief that technology was going to [...]

Don’t spro me, bro. That ridiculous sentence kept going through our heads when we visited Trabant Coffee & Chai near Pioneer Square. (Their other, mothership location is in the University District.) From afar, Trabant seems like they are trying to do some interesting things. They were voted Best Coffee in Seattle on CitySearch.com in 2005, [...]