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 [...]

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 [...]

In the transitioning Cape Town neighborhood of Woodstock, which out-Missions the Mission, this espresso bar and roaster perhaps looks like no other you’ve seen before. Located inside the newly-art-conscious Old Biscuit Mill, this small space is a pristine, stark black-&-white-themed coffee lab that exudes meticulous organization. The Old Biscuit Mill is known in town for [...]

Last night we attended a quasi-annual Portuguese wine tasting event sponsored by ViniPortugal. We’ve attended this event a few times prior (last at the Palace Hotel in 2008), and this was by far the worst: completely cramped quarters atop the 32nd floor of the Westin St. Francis, vendors who ran out of wine and bailed [...]

Now that Blue Bottle Coffee Co. has expanded their roasting operations, we can expect to be super-saturated with its coming ubiquity. While that’s an overall good thing — such as now being able to snag some fresh Blue Bottle beans at the hyper-local Avedano’s Meats in Bernal Heights — it does contribute to that espresso [...]

A couple months ago, we kicked up a bit of dust when we dressed down the Gibraltar, an espresso beverage created by accident when Blue Bottle Coffee Co. was opening their first SF café in 2005. We called it the fool’s cappuccino — essentially the same beverage, but poured in a cheap restaurant supply glass [...]

We had originally posted this as an addendum to our recent review of the new, more permanent installment of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in the Ferry Building Marketplace. However, the strange phenomenon of the Gibraltar deserves its very own post. Originating here in San Francisco, the Gibraltar has since spread to Los Angeles (Intelligentsia [...]

Opening this past Thursday (April 2, 2009) after a long wait for Blue Bottle to expand the production of their roasting operations, this café technically marks the third and fourth Blue Bottle stations in operation at the Ferry Building Marketplace on a busy weekend. But this is the first with more permanent (i.e., no cart) [...]

What a difference four years makes. One scalability challenge with an effort as large as CoffeeRatings.com is the attempt to cover the sheer number of places serving espresso in San Francisco while maintaining a common yardstick of consistency (to produce useful comparative reviews). But another challenge is keeping up with the changes; cafés open and [...]

Back in the 1980s, Wendy’s fast food restaurants sponsored a highly successful advertising campaign featuring a diminutive elderly Jewish woman (Clara Peller, she quickly became a cultural icon from these spots). When presented with the hamburgers of Wendy’s competitors, she famously asked, “Where’s the beef?!” These days, it seems like we need a similar campaign [...]