Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

In a Trader Joe’s mini strip mall off Highway 101, this café only seems to attract the attention of the locals — despite the heavy wine-tasting traffic along Vineyard Drive. If you haven’t been to this burgeoning California wine-growing region, you’ll be in for a shock at how much the industry here has developed out [...]

This casual, local café caters to the locals in a big way: to both patrons and employees. It’s located in a large, long building alongside the town railroad tracks at the dead-end of a street. Out front there is limited sidewalk seating — and an abused Snoopy sculpture, customary for Santa Rosa (aka Charles “Schutlzberg”). [...]

San Rafael-based Equator Estate Coffees has long been a major enigma for us. They have heavy distribution among high-end restaurants in town — and quite a few on the low-end. But despite the occasional accolades among tastemaker chefs, we just didn’t “get it.” Over the years, we sampled the espresso at well over 30 different [...]

In case you haven’t come across this article from the Long Island Press yesterday: Everything You Know About Coffee Is Wrong | Long Island Press. Wow — local journalism is still producing thoughtful, lengthy pieces that might actually tell the average reader something they didn’t already know? Sure enough, it’s a rather well-written and thoughtful [...]

Holy crap. This is one of those rare finds where a small town and a strip mall can produce some outstanding coffee and espresso that competes with the best. Although we were aware of Coffee Cat’s elevated reputation among the Scotts Valley locals when passing through, at first we were guilty of dismissing it relative [...]

For a few years now, we had an idea for a post that sat in our unpublished queue: how can you tell a good espresso shop from a bad one? (At least before sampling it.) Given the thousands of good, bad, and mediocre espresso shots we’ve reviewed over the years, we have definitely noticed some [...]

A recent, random excursion to San Diego produced at least this one CoffeeRatings.com Trip Report. Visiting an old friend there for this past Independence Day weekend, we literally encountered more UFOs than good coffeehouses while in town. If aliens were behind the four red UFOs we witnessed over El Cajon on the night of the [...]

Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that. If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of [...]

We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963. In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are [...]

Opening just a week ago — in the space previously occupied by the Illy shop, Caffé Il Latte — this tiny café is the first in San Francisco to use beans from Santa Cruz-based Verve Coffee Roasters. The tiny space relies on mirrored walls to add depth, and there is a little bit of a [...]