Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

La Colombe continues to play an interesting role in the modern evolution of consumer coffee tastes. Starting in 1985 in Seattle, co-founders Todd Carmichael and Jean Philippe (JP) Iberti joined forces and decided to set up their idea for a great American roaster in Philadelphia. Which was no small risk, given that Philadelphia isn’t the [...]

With NFL fans facing a major void in their lives since the NY Giants won the NFL’s Survivor: Indianapolis competition, thankfully there are publications like Food Republic that have come up with their own “power rankings.” As if to prove just how much we’re not making this up, it took Food Republic less than two [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Opening in Oct. 2009, James Freeman finally established a spacious company headquarters home for his ever-growing Bay Area coffee empire here in Jack London Square. They host a surprisingly small café for retail coffee service. There’s several tall stools and tables for outdoor seating along Webster St., and indoors there is barely a four-person window [...]

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 [...]

For all of Yountville’s culinary celebrity, some of the best espresso in town can be found in this bizarre complex. Opening in early 2009, Bardessono is a hotel/spa/restaurant thing that seems to ooze more sculpture and running water fountains per square foot than the rest of Yountville. And that’s saying something. The complex is LEED [...]

Today the New York Times Magazine blog posted a mini bio-piece on James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame: The Nifty 50 | James Freeman, Coffee Maker – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The story behind their “Nifty 50″ (did they hire a former 1960′s editor from Tiger Beat for that?) is to highlight “America’s [...]

If you’ve been to the Blue Bottle Cafe lately, you’ve probably noticed the sizable public sculpture, emblazoned with a beet, on the sidewalk just outside the front door. Is it a new take on 2004′s Hearts in San Francisco public sculpture project — itself inspired by 1999′s Chicago Cows on Parade exhibit? No, it’s much [...]