Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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 [...]

We’ve been monitoring Coca-Cola’s murky interests in the coffee business for some time now. The most obvious example being their patent filings in recent years, which have lead to — among other things — their launch of Far Coast coffee pod and machine systems for food service retailers. In today’s news, Coke announced they will [...]

The April 2007 issue of Coffee Talk primarily focused on the annual SCAA conference next month. The most interesting article comes from George Howell, president of Terroir Coffee Company, who wrote about the state of the world’s quality coffee supplies: Towards a segmented quality coffee market [PDF file, page 8]. With the growing public awareness [...]

In case you thought we were simply making things up for the benefit of a joke, coffee is truly getting worse at the same time it’s supposedly getting better. Today’s commercial flood of poorly designed home espresso machines marks some of these steps backwards. Other examples are more insidious, such as how the Nespresso machine [...]

Some of you may recall just how much the zombie children of the Fair Trade cult scare the bejeezus outta me. Ritual Coffee Roasters barista, Gabriel Boscana, wrote a much more tactful and civil approach to these single-issue customers in this month’s issue of Barista Magazine: FebMarch 07 – Certified Coffee Pusher. It was oddly [...]

The bizarrely misplaced food freak-out continues, as we have people overlooking the environmental, energy consumption, and dietary/health horrors of the processed foods that make up 80% of today’s American diet — focusing instead on caffeine as the root of all evil. Today, TV station KERO in Bakersfield, CA reported that a coffee-drinking New York city [...]

ChannelNewsAsia published an article today on Coca-Cola’s venture into coffee distribution in Singapore: Channelnewsasia.com – Coca-Cola ventures into premium specialty coffee. Coca-Cola has been investing in coffee service for quite some time. In previous posts here, we’ve covered their development of Far Coast pod systems — among other patents. As one of Wall Street’s darling [...]

So Coca-Cola finally revealed some of what they’ve been up to with their recent patent frenzy (as reported here in January): Coca-Cola’s next ‘real thing’: lattes – Sep. 1, 2006. Next Wednesday in Toronto, Coca-Cola plans to formally announce their foray into “premium” brewed tea and coffee. The brand is called Far Coast (the corresponding [...]

As a follow-up to Thursday’s post where we covered the coffee pod revolutionaries, yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article on how Big Beverage is plotting the demise of any actual coffee brewing: Drink makers want America to buy coffee to go. What’s puzzling is how many usually sensible industries are getting the new coffee equation [...]

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article yesterday on how soft drink industry giants are banking on coffee consumers wanting convenient, instantaneous coffee: Soft drink titans push coffee in a can | ajc.com. Just as when large, conglomerate coffee roasters convinced consumers that the future of good coffee was crystalized grit in a can during the [...]