Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

“Coffee Innovation”. If there were ever two words that make me shudder in fear and cause my taste buds to roll up and die, those two could well be it. And so those two words arose today in an article that reported “coffee manufacturers have been working on new and improved ways to serve coffee”: [...]

Yesterday, Consumer Reports announced that their taste testers rated McDonald’s premium coffee as superior to Starbucks‘ coffee. (Isn’t that a bit like a beauty contest between Courtney Love and Joan Rivers?) But the real story behind this isn’t their ratings so much as the response to these ratings: Coffee taste test stirs hot debate – [...]

Something has to distract the media and bloggers from their self-indulgent, T&A love-affair with this week’s story about stripper baristas in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Today’s The Record (Stockton, CA) made a valiant effort: Recordnet.com: Options to make the perfect cup of coffee. The article is a primer on the different coffee brewing methods and what [...]

I came across a coffee-related press release yesterday (as I often do), and I truly resisted writing about it — hoping it would just go away unnoticed. But then the company behind it is based out of San Francisco, and the press release hit the Associated Press today: AP Wire | 01/11/2007 | Mysterious `Meth [...]

Yesterday’s Sunday Times (London) ran a story concerning McDonald’s UK’s announcement of a coffee supply partnership with the Rainforest Alliance: McDonald’s brews up £1m fair trade deal – Sunday Times – Times Online. At first read, I opted not to add a blog entry on how the Rainforest Alliance served as another alternative example to [...]

Last year while looking to upgrade my home stereo from a Michael J. Fox-era boom box, I made the mistake of stopping into a Bose store. There I rudely discovered that Bose does not sell home stereos. No, they sell lifestyles. Problem was that I was already quite happy with my pre-owned lifestyle; I just [...]

There’s been a lot of “he said, she said” going on between Starbucks and representatives of the Ethiopian coffee trade lately. Ethiopian Sidamo and Harar (two generally excellent bean stocks, mind you) were up for trademark protection when a “certain voting member” of the U.S. National Coffee Association (or NCA, a business interest legacy of [...]

Not to be outdone by Coca-Cola’s Far Coast and CHAQWA announcements earlier this month, Big Four junk coffee giant, Nestlé, says “me too!”: Coke, Nestlé Take Aim at Starbucks (Advertising Age). I am not making this up: Nestlé marketing is instructing the media call their version the Nescafé Specialty Solutions’ bag-in-a-box system. How’s that for [...]

New York City — that backwater of quality espresso that has long proven, if I may paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “If you can make decent espresso there, you can make it anywhere” — has reportedly been hit by a “wave” (here we go again) of better coffee. Or so says today’s New York Times: Espresso’s New [...]

In the “who just can’t let a failed idea die” contest between McDonald’s McCafé and the Sony Mini-Disc, McDonald’s seems to be upping the ante along the Central Coast of California: Espresso now comes express at McDonald’s – LompocRecord.com. The strangest part is that the article cites Marcos Salazar, an area supervisor for McDonald’s, as [...]