Posted by TheShot on 21 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
Four years ago we posted about our disappointment over high-end restaurants that offered plenty of options for tea but only one for coffee. It’s as if these celebrated houses of distinguished taste decided that coffee had all the nuance and variety of unleaded gasoline — and it showed in the product they served. And when [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 20 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Foreign Brew
Mention the name “Woolworths” to an American, and they’ll think “Woolworth’s” [sic] (again with that possessive thing). Woolworth was founded in 1879 as one of America’s first five-and-dime stores — even if it has become known as Foot Locker since the turn of the millennium. For those who remember Woolworth as a discount dimestore, the [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
In the news today, researchers in Australia have decided to take a deconstructionist’s approach towards creating the ideal coffee: Australia Looks To Produce The Ultimate Cup Of Coffee | Gov Monitor. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) performed experiments to determine how picking coffee cherries at different stages in their maturity might affect [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 02 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Machine, Quality Issues, Roasting
If the title of this post seems like the product of a copy-editor undergoing a seizure, it is intentional. It echoes the title of a new article on Esquire’s Web site verbatim: Worst Coffee Trends – Bad Coffee Trends – Esquire. To thicken the plot, do note that this is the second article in a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 21 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Robusta
One of the long running jokes among the (these days: masochistic) fans who follow Italian soccer is that — at least according to the Italian sports media — teams tend to go from “crisis” to “crisis” several times in a given season. If a top-caliber team doesn’t win for two straight matches, sono in crisi [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 05 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Fair Trade, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
Saturday’s Chicago Tribune published a pretty good piece on Intelligentsia CEO, Doug Zell:
Intelligentsia Coffee’s CEO talks beans – chicagotribune.com.
While Doug gets a little loopy (our opinion) in abusing the ever-popular wine analogy for coffee — e.g., espousing such shoehorned ideas as coffee pairings — he’s been a pioneer and leader in areas such as:
responding to [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 04 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Fair Trade
Last week the Christian Science Monitor published an article highlighting the economic pressures on Latin America’s organic coffee farmers: Organic coffee: Why Latin America’s farmers are abandoning it / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.
Just as Fair Trade designed their program to attract coffee growers through the promise of financial incentives, once they made initial [...]
Posted by TheShot on 24 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Beans
Today’s SF Chronicle features an article on some of the lesser-known coffee growing regions of Hawaii: Hawaiian Islands erupt with new coffee regions. For each of the islands of Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Hawaii (the Big Island), they offer info on the coffee growing history of the island, what’s brewed from there today, and [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 23 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, CoffeeRatings.com, Foreign Brew, Roasting
Occasionally this Web site can be the source of a real life story, and the story of Caffè Mokabar is a good one. For a little background, after a couple weeks of espresso research in Piemonte, Italy last October, we were most duly impressed with Caffè Mokabar among all the coffee roasters we encountered. So [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 21 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew
Japanese consumer fads notoriously have about the same lifespan as mayflies — or a Rudi Giulliani presidential campaign, whichever comes shorter. However, here’s one we had not heard of before until seeing this in today’s The Daily Yomiuri: Newly harvested coffee beans attracting attentions : Arts Weekend : Features : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily [...]
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