Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today’s New York Times reported on another chapter in this year’s ownership-change-for-funding-for-growth saga of quality independent coffee chains: Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea Asks a Friend to Help It Grow – NYTimes.com. This past May, the subject was Stumptown Coffee Roasters — generating quite a bit of angst among many loyalists who cried “sell-out!” This time [...]

The name is “Ma’velous”. We’re not sure if this is a New Yorker thing — like when Monday Night Football legend, Al Michaels, tries to pronounce the ‘h’ in the word “huge.” But the owner, Phillip Ma, is a self-fashioned coffee geek with apparently enough money for high-end coffeemaking toys but no real prior training [...]

The New York Times today published a piece on the Bay Area roaster land grab going on out East: West Coast Coffee Roasters Are Lengthening Their Reach – NYTimes.com. Ritual Coffee Roasters, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Four Barrel Coffee are each mentioned — lugging their roasting equipment over the Rocky Mountains and [...]

This corner café looks more at home in Tucson than SF: it’s akin to adobe construction. To think this was the former home of the Octavia Lounge piano bar/cabaret. Past a heavy wooden door and faux totem pole on entry, it has beat up, reddish wooden floors, white stone walls, beat up tables that look [...]

MSN City Guides recently joined the ever-popular year-end parade of Internet-friendly Top 10 lists: America’s Best Coffee – 1 – MSN City Guides. As if to show Bon Appétit that they, too, can list their favorites without the bother of any supporting criteria, MSN’s editors also took an early holiday and let two additional nominees [...]

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere It’s up to you — New York, New York When Liza Minnelli first sang these words about “making it”, and Frank Sinatra later belted them out as a sort of co-opted trademark, they obviously weren’t singing about making coffee. Because when it comes to good [...]

A couple weeks back we visited this café with Tim of espressophile fame. Approaching its North Beach location, you wouldn’t think it would be much different from the others nearby — but you’d be wrong. The espresso here is a real standout in the neighborhood, coinciding with the ownership change in late 2008 to Alex [...]

It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08. For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be [...]

Regular readers here are familiar with our squawking about Slow Food in this blog for almost three years now. You might even recall our pilgrimage to the Slow Food mothership in Bra, Italy last October. But in case you haven’t seen the orange and black posters everywhere, next weekend Slow Food comes to America for [...]

Weren’t we just saying that there are only about three or four people with original story ideas? Sure enough, this time it’s the New York Times that recycled the same local roasters story idea that has already been once around the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post in recent months: Specialty Coffee Roasters Brew [...]