Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

The story of coffee at Specialty’s Café & Bakery reflects the story of San Francisco’s consumer tastes for retail coffee. In the beginning, there was Faema + Prebica — and it was weak A decade ago, Specialty’s ran a small chain of bakery/cafés with coffee service areas. Some locations, like this one on Pine St., [...]

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 [...]

Frog Hollow Farm reserves a rather anonymous place in the retail coffee history of San Francisco, but it was a watershed for the coffee quality in this city. As much as we roll our eyes at the hackneyed and abused third wave term, by many definitions (theirs, and definitely not ours) this was SF’s first [...]

It’s been a rather sad week for coffee news. An embarrassment, really — with headlines dominated by the ridiculous. There’s Racheal Ray’s TV commercial promoting both Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee and her Death-to-Israel Hamas credentials (though who hasn’t wanted to go jihad on her?). There are vocal members of Christian groups that we now need [...]

One of the odder, and better, espresso adventures in San Francisco is the outdoor Blue Bottle Coffee tent that descends on the Ferry Building Marketplace every week like a traveling Burning Man exhibition. Starting in 2004, East Bay artisan roaster James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee brought his coffee cart out to the weekend farmers’ [...]