Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Yesterday morning, KQED radio aired an hour-long Forum segment featuring a small round-table of SF coffee “luminaries”: SF’s Coffee Innovators: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. The panel included James Freeman, of Blue Bottle Coffee, Eileen Hassi, of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and an unusually quiet Jeremy Tooker, of Four Barrel Coffee. Much like [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, caffe_mediterraneum, cortado, eileen_hassi, four_barrel, gibraltar, grinders, home_roasting, india_coffee, james_freeman, jeremy_tooker, laptop_zombies, latte_art, peets_coffee, ritual_roasters, Starbucks, third_wave

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In the eight years since we started CoffeeRatings.com, we’ve been patiently waiting for something better. After all, we built CoffeeRatings.com out of frustration over a lack of useful quality information about area coffeehouses in a semi-structured, objective-criteria-driven format. So you’d think we’d be encouraged by the acute rise in venture-capital-funded code monkeys who promise to [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, food_trucks, four_barrel, gibraltar, mr_coffee, rancilio, social_networking, Starbucks, tartine_bakery, yelp, zagat

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As we last left our story, SOMA‘s ever-morphing Sightglass Coffee was glacially executing on its grand designs to become a major SF roastery and a spacious coffee destination. It had been over a year since we last walked among the spent heroin needles of nearby 6th Street, so much of our new Sightglass experience had [...]

Tags: acf_cups, barefoot_roasters, brightness_bomb, coffee_roasting, espresso_review, four_barrel, laptop_zombies, probat, sightglass, soma, supermodel_cappuccino, third_wave

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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 [...]

Tags: coffee_prices, de_la_paz, fair_trade, folgers, four_barrel, philz_coffee, ritual_roasters

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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 [...]

Tags: coffee_roasters, coffee_rush, ecco_caffe, four_barrel, intelligentsia, potrero_hill, stumptown

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Locals rave about this coffee cubbyhole, which opened in July 2010, and you can see why. This colorful stretch of Mission St., in the heart of the Mission, has a dearth of decent coffee shops. At least ones that don’t serve ashy, overextracted dreck. This tiny shop offers four metal stools at a short counter [...]

Tags: espresso_review, four_barrel, hario_v60_dripper, la_marzocco, mission, nuova_point

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Last week brought us yet another coffee article about wine analogies and making the “perfect” (groan) cup: The Art of the Perfect Cup of Coffee | CulturePOP | Ingredients for an Artful Life. What was different about this one is it consisted of an interview with reigning WBC champ Michael Phillips of Chicago’s Intelligentsia. In [...]

Tags: chemex, coffee_blending, four_barrel, perfect_espresso, wine_analogy

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There was a time when people bored with food found that it was a lot more fun when you put it on a stick. Or freeze-dried and packed it in plastic tubes as “astronaut food”. Today’s equivalent is the glorified roach coach, where bored (and sometimes broke) foodies tell us that everything tastes better when [...]

Tags: brightness_bomb, clever_dripper, espresso_review, financial_district, food_trucks, four_barrel, laptop_zombies, la_marzocco, nuova_point, pour_over_coffee

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Call it coffee’s version of Hubble’s Law: the rate at which a local coffee scene evolves is inversely proportional to its maturity. What?!? Let us explain. Seattle and San Francisco are examples of well-established coffee cultures, and the rate of evolution and improvement we see in the coffee there tends to nudge along at a [...]

Tags: americano, Barista, barista_championships, cape_town_cafes, coffee_choices, compak, crema, cup_of_excellence, deconstructionism, espresso_choices, four_barrel, latte_art, la_marzocco, origin_coffee_roasting, quality_standards, ritual_roasters, single_origin_espresso, specialty_drinks, synesso, truth

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A viral video is going around these days on “The Coffee Wars of San Francisco”. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek with its Ken-Burns-documentary-style humor — though that largely reminds us of how much Ken Burns can lull us to sleep like a bottle of brandy. While the mockumentary oscillates between the mildly funny and the painfully [...]

Tags: barefoot_roasters, blue_bottle, four_barrel, frog_hollow_farm, james_freeman, ritual_roasters, verve

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