Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today’s installment for comic relief Friday comes from a regular blog reader here (espressophile): New Coffee Concept Makes Roasting Obsolete | Roaster Project. This comic piece from the Roaster Project is highly buzzword-compliant (“fourth wave”, etc.). Part of its premise is that if third wave coffee is “barely roasted,” the next stage is to not [...]

A couple weeks ago, a regular reader made a very relevant comment on our last post: “You have become very negative. When was the last positive post?” They were completely on target, and we have noticed this trend in ourselves for months now. (See: Coffee Commenter Archetype #10.) The reasons are worth a post here. [...]

Today’s The Age (Melbourne, Australia) published a less-than-convinced article on the experimental fad of pairing coffees with a meal: Claire’s roast: Coffee matching leaves bitter taste. And Melbourne is a town that famously knows its coffee. For me, the lingering question had been whether the concept of matching food to coffee would work…and based on [...]

Two curious, seemingly unrelated posts appeared simultaneously in the news yesterday. One on La Marzocco‘s new Strada machine and all its variable-pressure-control glory: Ristretto | Strada – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The other, Esquire installment #3 from Todd Carmichael, about the ridiculous MSRP/retail prices for professional espresso machines and what most people in the [...]

We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have [...]

Today Salon magazine posted their take on this whole “Hey baby, what’s your wave?” coffee business: Baristas gone wild: meet fourth-wave coffee – Coffee and tea – Salon.com. We most appreciated that they wrote the article from a coffee consumer’s perspective. What often gets lost in this feeding frenzy of hyperbole is that none of [...]

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 [...]