Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Yesterday CNN posted a brief video piece on coffee culture in its birthplace, Ethiopia: Ethiopia’s coffee love affair – CNN.com. The interviewees were weak, but the under-five-minute video offers some of the cultural backdrop behind coffee’s birthplace: the importance of coffee in the culture, how Ethiopians consume their coffee, and some of the challenges Ethiopians [...]

Tags: coffee_cupping, ethiopian_coffee, paper_cups

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This industrial art space café opened in late 2009 and is easy to miss — despite its size and being across the street from AT&T Park. There are a few French café tables among the front patio and also inside, but inside it is primarily a large art space with white walls and a number [...]

Tags: china_basin, clever_dripper, equator_estate, espresso_review, four_barrel, laranzato, paper_cups, pour_over_coffee, third_wave

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Sometimes we simply cannot believe our eyes. Today we were browsing through the coffee industry trade rag, Coffee Talk, and we stumbled across this advertisement from International Paper. Could there be anything more wrong with this photo? We can only guess that the marketing executives that approved this ad haven’t been any closer to Tuscany [...]

Tags: italy_coffee, paper_cups, tuscany

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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 – [...]

Tags: australia, australia_coffee, books, cafe_reviews, coffee_quality, coffee_roasters, melbourne, melbourne_cafes, paper_cups

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One of the things that the big coffee chains do well is consistency. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom, lifted straight from the fast food chain playbook. A McDonald’s french fry is pretty much the same everywhere, and the coffee served at a big chain is little different. Or so we’ve all been told. [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, coffee_chains, consistency, illy, la_marzocco, mr-espresso, paper_cups, peets_coffee, Starbucks, verismo

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For a few years now, we had an idea for a post that sat in our unpublished queue: how can you tell a good espresso shop from a bad one? (At least before sampling it.) Given the thousands of good, bad, and mediocre espresso shots we’ve reviewed over the years, we have definitely noticed some [...]

Tags: americas_best_coffee, Barista, cafe_cleanliness, cleaning, coffee_quality, coffee_roasters, illy, latte_art, la_marzocco, la_spaziale, paper_cups, peerless_coffee, quality_standards, Starbucks, superautomatic_espresso_machines

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Introduction Here at CoffeeRatings.com, we prefer to be experimentalists rather than theorists. This means we may have opinions, but we try to back them up with first-hand experience — even if it means consuming coffee, Fear Factor-style, that we would much rather avoid. Last year when Starbucks announced they were purchasing The Coffee Equipment Company, [...]

Tags: clover_brewer, coffee_brewing, coffee_freshness, coffee_review, mahlkonig, paper_cups, Starbucks

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It may have been a while, but we have reviewed employee espresso bars before. What’s unusual this time is that the espresso bar doesn’t belong to a coffee business. But when said business is slinging shots of Barefoot Coffee Roasters beans out of UNIC Twin machines, we take an interest. The company in question is [...]

Tags: astra, barefoot_roasters, espresso_review, google, mazzer, mountain_view_coffee, paper_cups, social_networking, UNIC, user_ratings, user_reviews, yelp

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Yesterday’s New York Times published an article on the accelerating demise of the neighborhood French café: Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering – NYTimes.com. This time last year, we scoffed at the suggestion that France’s then-impending smoking ban would trigger the collapse of French café society. But sure enough, that collapse appears to be in [...]

Tags: cafe_society, france, french_cafes, french_coffee, paper_cups, third_place, to-go-coffee

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When it comes to coffeehouses in San Francisco, few are worth writing home about. This isn’t one of them. But then the Castro Cheesery exemplifies what you most commonly find in the city’s murky midrange of espresso bars. Contrary to its name, cheese plays second fiddle to the vast array of roasted coffee available for [...]

Tags: caffen_coffee, castro, espresso_review, paper_cups, rancilio

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