Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Copy-editors are strange beasts. They can take a perfectly valid story, dress it up with titles and subheds, and transform it into something that sounds completely irrelevant to the contents within. Take yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece on efforts seeking the genetic diversification of consumable coffee: The Indiana Jones of Coffee – WSJ.com (subhed: “Companies [...]

The LA Times today published a curious article on attempts to commercially grow coffee in the continental U.S. (California, in fact): Market Watch: Jay Ruskey perks interest with California-grown coffee – latimes.com. Started as a project in 2002 with an eye towards replicating Kona‘s successful specialty coffee industry in Hawaii, two of the biggest challenges [...]

A friend of this Web site, Andrew Hetzel, called it the best article about Kona coffee ever written. That’s a pretty tall order. But this piece, which came out a couple days ago, makes a compelling argument: Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines – Adventures in Coffeeland. It’s at least good enough to make [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]