As many of you may know, we started CoffeeRatings.com in 2003 with the idea of making a printed, local, quantitative guide to San Francisco’s best coffee. Our fair city still lacks its own printed guide, but that hasn’t stopped cities such as Sydney and Melbourne in Australia from forging ahead: Mecca Espresso Ultimo Cafe of the Year In SMH Good Cafe Guide 2011, and The winners of The Age Good Cafe Guide Awards 2011.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) have each just released inaugural Good Cafe Guide publications to promote the best coffeeshops in their respective hometowns. In Sydney, Mecca Espresso in Ultimo took top café honors while Auction Rooms in North Melbourne did the same for its mother city. Coffee Alchemy in Marrickville and Seven Seeds in Carlton each took their city’s respective top coffee prizes. (Note to Californians: Melbourne is sometimes referred as San Francisco to Sydney’s L.A.)

Each guide boasts around 250 reviewed cafés that make the cut, awarding points primarily for coffee quality. But the guides also reward a “café’s commitment to quality beans and a great experience.” As noted in the SMH article cited above, a number of cafés are rated with one, two, or three stars. In the printed guide, they are rated up to three “coffee cups” (rather than stars) — making them not unlike the chicchi awarded in the Gambero Rosso’s annual Bar d’Italia. (The Bar d’Italia uses up to three chicchi, or coffee beans, to rate an establishment’s coffee. Not to confuse things, but it additionally uses up to three coffee cups to rate these places for qualities other than their coffee.)

The SMH article also mentions some emerging trends for area coffeeshops, including naked portafilters, local microroasting, tasting rooms/cupping schools, new contraptions to showcase single origins, bone china cups (here here!), and economy-sized drinks such as the piccolo latte or mezzo-mezzo. In other words: today’s Sydney coffee culture sounds a lot like San Francisco circa 2008. But you have to forgive them, considering that Australia lacks a filter-brewed coffee culture and history.

While both of these printed guides are new, they enter a saturating market for printed city coffee guides in Australia.

We’ve posted before about Melbourne’s claim as the coffee capital of Australia. In addition to the Melbourne Coffee Review Web site we noted back in 2007 (in operation since 2004), there is now a printed guide to Melbourne’s top 100 coffee shops with the title Melbourne Coffee Review: Crema of the crop – Epicure – Entertainment – theage.com.au.

Some 20 reviewers make up the short reviews on the Web site and, now, guide. And not unlike the Gambero Rosso Bar d’Italia, places with the top coffee scores earn three beans. Within this guide, beneath the sacrilegious paper cups brandished on its cover, these three-bean cafés include these three locations: 7 Seeds, Brother Baba Budan and St. ALi.

As some of you might know, this Web site started with the idea for a printed, local coffee guide in 2002. We’ve been published before, and our book proposal seemed to fit a real opportunity and need for a town brimming with coffee history and culture.

But after engaging with a number of local guide mongers — including Chronicle Books, Globe Pequot Press, Sasquatch Books, Sunbelt Publications, and TenSpeed Press — we were dismayed by how clueless these publishers were about the market for local information on quality coffee. It was as if we were proposing to write a book reviewing public toilets in SF. (Come to think of it, that’s not so terrible an idea either.) Thus in 2003, out of frustration, we took our research directly to the Web.

Of course, the world is awash in wannabe authors with bad ideas and grudges against “clueless” publishers. (Insert disgruntled, misunderstood scientist cackling, “They laughed at my ideas and called me mad! But I’ll show them… I’ll show them all!“) But the publication of yet another local coffee shop guide, with ratings based on coffee quality, adds just a little more fuel to our we-told-you-so fire.

Also overheard in Melbourne…

So what else is going on, coffee-wise, in Melbourne — the city that also gave us talents as diverse as Rupert Murdoch, Steve Irwin, Olivia Newton-John, and Flea?

Recently, the local press published a story promoting the coffee, prices, and siphon brewing equipment of a Melbourne café that curiously reminded us of an old Blue Bottle Cafe post: Coffee lovers forking out $12 a cup for trendy brews. And just before that, they published an article on their own new local roaster phenomenon, reminding us of our own from way back when: Ruling the roast.

So if Melbourne can publish a local coffee quality guide, what’s our excuse? Besides clueless publishers, that is…

While we’re on the subject of international coffee, today’s The Hindu (India… and I guess quite obviously so) published an article documenting Melbourne, Australia’s claim to be at the heart of that nation’s coffee culture: The Hindu : Magazine / Columns : Coffee anyone?.

Melbourne has a pretty strong case. They have a rich coffee history, a vast number of quality cafés, coffee walking tours (“the Coffee Crawl”), and loyal readership behind the Melbourne Coffee Review (and there’s even a Melbourne Cafe Reviews). Exploring the obligatory “local angle”, the article also touches on the use of Monsooned Malabar beans from India.

UPDATE: June 4, 2007
Melbourne’s The Age essentially added to this story today, touching on the roots of Italian immigrants who changed the local coffee culture for the better in the 1950s: Ruling the roast – Epicure – Entertainment – theage.com.au.

CoffeeRatings.com was inspired by the importance of a scientific approach towards developing comparative reviews of espresso. But this somewhat clinical approach can at times take a little of the joy out of the espresso-sipping experience.

Which is why I am oddly inspired by the purely linguistic constraints imposed by a Melbourne, Australia blogger: Five word coffee shop reviews « My Opinions Are Important. Using five-word reviews, this approach — suggestive of haiku — is universally applied to describe the quality of the coffee at over 100 purveyors in Australia.

For those with a particularly ancient, arcane knowledge of the Web, they remind me of an old Web site of my own: the many terse album review entries in the Quick Fix Music Review List (which, due to personal neglect, sadly disappeared from the Web in 1996 … and yet lives on, like a phantom limb, in a handful of broken links around the Internet).