Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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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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., [...]

Tags: acf_cups, big_four_coffee, blue_bottle, caffe_artigiano, espresso_review, faema, financial_district, franke, frog_hollow_farm, hario_v60_dripper, intelligentsia, la_marzocco, Starbucks, superautomatic_espresso_machines

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For as long as I’ve lived in San Francisco — over two decades now — I’ve lived with laments over the sorry state of local newspapers. Living in a large Victorian shared among Berkeley graduate students many years ago, I grew accustomed to a daily house copy of one of the Timeses (i.e., either the [...]

Tags: barista_championships, cafe_reviews, coffee_maps, intelligentsia, lamill_coffee, la_cafes, la_coffee

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This month’s Wired magazine published a piece on this year’s Cup of Excellence (CoE) competition in Colombia: Sip, Spit, Grade: Coffee Experts Crown Colombia’s Best Beans | Magazine. Opening with the Q-grading Alberto Trujillo and Intelligentsia‘s Geoff Watts, the article describes the Cup of Excellence process and a little of its short history. It also [...]

Tags: coffee_growers, colombia, colombia_coffee, cup_of_excellence, intelligentsia, wired_magazine

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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. [...]

Tags: coffee_crisis, coffee_prices, fourth_wave, hario_v60_dripper, intelligentsia, pour_over_coffee, scaa, south_africa_coffee, third_wave, usbc

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The name is “Ma’velous”. We’re not sure if this is a New Yorker thing — like when Monday Night Football legend, Al Michaels, tries to pronounce the ‘h’ in the word “huge.” But the owner, Phillip Ma, is a self-fashioned coffee geek with apparently enough money for high-end coffeemaking toys but no real prior training [...]

Tags: acf_cups, blue_bottle, cafe_organica, chemex, civic_center, coffee_choices, ecco_caffe, espresso_choices, espresso_review, hario_v60_dripper, intelligentsia, james_freeman, la_marzocco, pour_over_coffee, siphon_bars, wendelboe

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It wasn’t long ago that the word obsession conjured up much more negative connotations in society. Today obsession is practically treated like a virtue — something to aspire to — and it can apply to something as neurotically trivial as the cup of coffee you drink when you are traveling. Case and point with an [...]

Tags: azores_coffee, intelligentsia, portugal_coffee, travel_coffee

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Is there anything the The Huffington Post won’t publish these days? Fortunately, this includes one of the better summaries of the US Barista Championship, completed yesterday: Todd Burbo: Intelligentsia Wins National Title, then Throws it Back. Congratulations are in order for Mike Phillips of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Chicago, now the winner for two [...]

Tags: Barista, barista_championships, barista_training, intelligentsia, mike_phillips, scaa, usbc

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The New York Times today published a piece on the Bay Area roaster land grab going on out East: West Coast Coffee Roasters Are Lengthening Their Reach – NYTimes.com. Ritual Coffee Roasters, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Four Barrel Coffee are each mentioned — lugging their roasting equipment over the Rocky Mountains and [...]

Tags: barefoot_roasters, blue_bottle, coffee_bean_seasonality, coffee_roasters, coffee_rush, ecco_caffe, flat_white, four_barrel, intelligentsia, ritual_roasters, third_wave

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Saturday’s Chicago Tribune published a pretty good piece on Intelligentsia CEO, Doug Zell: Intelligentsia Coffee’s CEO talks beans – chicagotribune.com. While Doug gets a little loopy (our opinion) in abusing the ever-popular wine analogy for coffee — e.g., espousing such shoehorned ideas as coffee pairings — he’s been a pioneer and leader in areas such [...]

Tags: barista_championships, coffee_beans, coffee_bean_seasonality, coffee_freshness, coffee_nazis, coffee_pairing, direct_trade, doug_zell, fair_trade, intelligentsia, peets_coffee, wine_analogy

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