Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

The year 2008 wasn’t about to end without a couple of newsworthy coffee notes. First, we have Chicago’s Intelligentsia banning coffee urns at their Broadway St. mothership: Intelligentsia on Broadway banishes urn coffee | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene. Earlier this year, we reported on how they killed [...]

Saveur is one among many “gourmet” food, wine, and travel magazines (as much as we hate that hackneyed 80′s word) — but with a specific focus on international cuisines. “Saveur” being French for “flavor”. Now whether “Saveur Sav” would be a clock-and-beret-wearing member of France’s answer to Public Enemy is still up for debate. (Oui, [...]

To the uninitiated, CoffeeRatings.com might look more like a horse racing tip sheet than a coffee Web site. But there are very good reasons why we’ve gone through the effort to quantify things. Just look at the chaos that can ensue when you don’t follow a system nor a simple baseline set of evaluation criteria: [...]

It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08. For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be [...]

In the name-dropping department, the September issue of Food & Wine magazine included a brief article on a select assortment of “classic and new places around the country with the most fanatical devotees” in the world of quality coffee: Where to Go Next: Best U.S. Coffee Bars | Food & Wine. Included on the list [...]

Today’s Chicago Tribune reported on Intelligentia‘s plans to phase out the 20-ounce, venti-sized coffee beverage: Small. Medium. Gone. — chicagotribune.com. “Drinking our coffee is not like drinking jug wine,” the article quotes Intelligentsia founder and CEO, Doug Zell. Mr. Zell also goes on to compare the venti experience to “a watered-down, Big Gulpish version.” We’ve [...]

With Spring upon us, that means it’s time for the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC): ‘Attention to every detail’ at Berkeley barista contest – San Jose Mercury News. Starting this past Friday and ending today (check out their photo album), the 2008 WRBC performs a time-honored ritual to select a barista champ representing our [...]

If Peet’s Coffee & Tea has been a slow-growth contrast to Starbucks‘ cancerous proliferation in recent years, Intelligentsia‘s expansion has been deliberately glacial. And why not? You get big, you get less selective about your coffee growers and suppliers. You start accepting employees with fewer skills and less passion about truly good coffee. And how’s [...]

On the heel’s of Chicago’s informal crowning as America’s caffeine capital, today’s Chicago Tribune published an article that provided a light, unscientific, comparative review of 32 different take-out coffee offerings in the Chicago area: Know your Joe — chicagotribune.com. Instead of the single espresso, the yardstick used at CoffeeRatings.com, the Tribune based their evaluations on [...]

Today’s Chicago Tribune published an article that briefly compared Fair Trade, Direct Trade, and a number of their socially conscious coffee bretheren: All’s not always ‘fair’ in coffee labeling | Chicago Tribune. It’s about time the mainstream media tried to clear the air and dispel some accepted myths about certifications and labelling. In specific, the [...]