Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Nobody enjoys paying 83% more for something than they paid for it last year. That is, unless you’re living in Zimbabwe under a 89.7 sextillion percent inflation rate. Earlier this year, the media were hot and heavy with news stories about surging coffee prices. However, some such stories are still trickling in — such as [...]

Thanks to Tim of espressophile fame for giving us a heads-up on this article posted yesterday from GQ magazine: The Most Important Drink of Your Day: Restaurants + Bars: GQ. Tim got his heads-up from the guys down at Verve Coffee Roasters, who are among the handful of regional coffee shops highlighted in this best-of [...]

Must be a light news day for the SF Chronicle to pull out an evergreen story like this today: Exploring our love of the bean from the grounds up. But while the Chronical [sic] has published up to 70% of the material in previous articles, the article provides a worthy (albeit brief) examination of SF’s [...]

In the “what were they thinking?” department, here’s a recent blog post discussing a new Folgers Coffee TV advertising campaign: Folgers: the taste of bad advertising « Jenichka’s Weblog. It’s been about 2-3 months since Folgers last publicly humiliated themselves — so this could be an improvement, depending on your perspective. The theme of this [...]

We have to admit: marketers of whole foods and commodities don’t have it easy. Product marketing is so much easier when you can reformulate and industrially process something with a bogus health claim and slap a “New!” logo on the packaging. It gets even easier when you can inject exotic substances with a “newly discovered” [...]

How is it that some people can unwittingly ridicule themselves far more than anyone else could while trying? Case and point with Folgers Coffee. Allow us to use a more bizarre application of the ever-popular wine analogy for coffee: for decades, Folgers profited as coffee’s equivalent of Thunderbird. But as consumers have developed more of [...]

As we hinted in a previous post, San Francisco magazine just published Josh Sens’ story on the more recent evolution of San Francisco’s local coffee scene in its most recent issue: A new buzz | San Francisco online. (There’s even an article featuring CoffeeRatings.com on the back page: The coffee bard | San Francisco online.) [...]

In a bizarre way, I have to give props to NPR today for airing a story on coffee tasters at Folgers, of all places: NPR : Meet the Woman Who Dictates the Taste of Coffee. NPR could have just as easily chosen to stereotypically interview the coffee taster at some sedated, eco-friendly company run by [...]

Today’s New York Times Magazine published an article on the declining design aesthetic of the espresso machine: The Pod People – New York Times. As the author puts it, “Cape Canaveralesque control centers that have replaced those great machines.” And she blames the meteoric popularity of Starbucks, which inspired a great wave of ensuing greed [...]

On Friday, The Republican (Springfield, MA) reported on a recent, local case of daughter-mother domestic abuse: Counseling ordered in ‘poisoned coffee’ case – Breaking News – MassLive.com. On the surface, the story is your typical police blotter fodder. But peel back a layer, and it raises all sorts of questions about what really goes into [...]