Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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, [...]

Tags: 49th_parallel, citysearch, clover_brewer, espresso_review, nuova_point, seattle_cafes, seattle_espresso, synesso

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Today the New York Times Magazine blog posted a mini bio-piece on James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame: The Nifty 50 | James Freeman, Coffee Maker – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The story behind their “Nifty 50″ (did they hire a former 1960′s editor from Tiger Beat for that?) is to highlight “America’s [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, clover_brewer, coffee_roasters, gimme_coffee, hawaii_cafes, james_freeman, melitta_bar, nyc_coffee, siphon_bars, slayer_espresso_machine

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Ever since Starbucks announced their outright purchase of the Clover brewer supply, it was a mere matter of time before replacement filter-coffee-brewing setups were anointed by the coffeeshop elite. From the Chicagoist today, at least Intelligentsia seems settled on the Hario ceramic coffee dripper and kettle: More Change Brewing at Intelligentsia – Chicagoist. Ah, yes. [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, hario_v60_dripper, melitta_bar, Starbucks, third_wave

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Over the years, we’ve dropped notes about New York City’s coffee culture: from its origins as a desolate wasteland through its more recent redemption. Like the awkward and homely tomboy who first gussies herself up for the debutant ball, in the past year New York City has been running a major publicity campaign to promote [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, coffee_quality, nyc_cafes, nyc_coffee, quality_standards

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This split café and to-go market is founded by Chef Charlie Ayers, famous for catering for the Grateful Dead (as evidenced by the large wall photo inside) and the initial food operations at Google. This place is his attempt to make his Google cafeteria “public.” It has limited outdoor table and picnic bench seating. Inside [...]

Tags: barefoot_roasters, clover_brewer, espresso_review, la_marzocco, palo_alto_coffee, peninsula_coffee

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Esquire magazine named this place 2008 Restaurant of the Year (among new restaurants). The same Nov. 2008 issue also crowned Dominique Crenn, executive chef at SF’s excellent-but-underappreciated Luce, as 2008′s Chef of the Year. While L2O is a pretty fabulous restaurant, calling it the year’s best is debatable. However, there’s no question this is a [...]

Tags: chicago, chicago_coffee, clover_brewer, intelligentsia, la_marzocco, restaurant_coffee, restaurant_espresso

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Introduction Here at CoffeeRatings.com, we prefer to be experimentalists rather than theorists. This means we may have opinions, but we try to back them up with first-hand experience — even if it means consuming coffee, Fear Factor-style, that we would much rather avoid. Last year when Starbucks announced they were purchasing The Coffee Equipment Company, [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, coffee_brewing, coffee_freshness, coffee_review, mahlkonig, paper_cups, Starbucks

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The year 2008 wasn’t about to end without a couple of newsworthy coffee notes. First, we have Chicago’s Intelligentsia banning coffee urns at their Broadway St. mothership: Intelligentsia on Broadway banishes urn coffee | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene. Earlier this year, we reported on how they killed [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, coca-cola, intelligentsia, vac_pot

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This week we came across a curious video published by Voice of America: VOA News – Seattle: Capital of Coffee Houses. If you wonder why something called “Voice of America” produces video, you’ll question that even more after viewing this parody of a 1980′s corporate training video. But the video is essentially a review of [...]

Tags: barista_championships, citysearch, clover_brewer, coffee_marketing, coffee_tech, david_schomer, espresso_vivace, seattle_cafes, spro, trabant

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It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08. For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, coffee_blends, dark_roasts, direct_trade, ecco_caffe, fair_trade, greenwashing, intelligentsia, ritual_roasters, slow_food, slow_food_nation

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