Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Last week we wrote about how coffee, like food, has become a primary form of consumer entertainment. We also mentioned recent experiences at newer coffee bars that have felt, well, “manipulative and artificial.” This concern over what seems real might sound trivial, but it’s at the foundation of a great deal of consumer behavior and […]

Please repeat after me: “Food and drink is entertainment.” What do I mean by that? Public tastes in entertainment change. We no longer attend social dances or go to the circus. In fact, if someone probably heard their neighbors were doing that, they would hide any of their small children. And instead of seeing the […]

Online social media is hardly new. Online BBSes have existed since the 1970s. Even yours truly geeked out for a bit on packet radio in the 1980s. But today we have reached a sort of critical mass on the Internet where, like sex and drugs in the 1960s, “everyone is doing it”. Except that “everyone” […]

If you’ve noticed the sound of crickets around here lately, you’re not the only one. Sure, we’ve been quietly plodding along at updating our espresso reviews. But the media coverage on coffee over the past few weeks has been boring and uneventful. That is until this week, when we came across two examples of how […]

Like celebrity deaths, do waves always come in threes? Our long history of mocking the industry term, the Third Wave, aside, we’re starting to think our affections for Starbucks are entering a third wave of sorts. Years ago it transitioned from ridicule to ambivalence, but now it’s starting to take on subtle shades of pity. […]

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune reported on a curious coffee bar concept planned for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea‘s latest location, currently under construction in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach. The concept includes featuring five different stations where five separate baristas personally attend to each customer, individually catering to their unique coffee whims: Intelligentsia plans a groundbreaking coffee bar […]

Last week, the Contra Costa Times published an article announcing the Bay Area arrival of McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks: McDonald’s new coffee drinks ignite breakfast wars – ContraCostaTimes.com. Of course, none of this info is really new, so we’re a bit perplexed over how someone can “ignite” something with a two-year-long fuse. But the article […]