Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

If you were to read it in the current Roast magazine article (from the Jan-Feb 2012 issue), India is a coffee consumer desert. This week TIME magazine wrote about the entrance of Starbucks in the Indian market as if to dismiss any prior coffee consumption there. But after spending three weeks in South India’s coffee-growing [...]

Tags: cafe_coffee_day, caffe_pascucci, coffee_growers, coffee_origin, cortado, espressamente, india_cafes, india_coffee, latte_art, la_marzocco, peets_coffee, south_india_filter_coffee, Starbucks, third_place, third_wave

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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 [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, caffe_mediterraneum, cortado, eileen_hassi, four_barrel, gibraltar, grinders, home_roasting, india_coffee, james_freeman, jeremy_tooker, laptop_zombies, latte_art, peets_coffee, ritual_roasters, Starbucks, third_wave

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Next month Berkeley hosts its first ever coffee and tea festival, and the SF Chronicle used the opportunity to mention Berkeley’s coffee and espresso roots: Berkeley perks up for Coffee and Tea Festival. The piece adds a bit of worthy Berkeley coffee history, even if it’s a slight retread of a 2009 piece in The [...]

Tags: alfred_peet, berkeley, caffe_mediterraneum, coffee_history, latte, peets_coffee

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It’s been a while since we posted something specifically about Starbucks. Yes, they still exist. Their CEO, Howard Schultz, is currently promoting a book, published yesterday, called Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul. If you mentally have to go back to the Clinton administration to remember when Starbucks last had [...]

Tags: howard_schultz, peets_coffee, Starbucks, starbucks_entertainment

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If you’re not aware of the disloyalty card concept, it originated a couple years ago in the UK from former world barista champ, Gwilym Davies. The kicker is that it’s supposed to be the opposite of a customer loyalty card, where consumers are given financial incentives for repeat business. Like the kind you get from [...]

Tags: barista_championships, coffee_chains, loyalty_programs, peets_coffee, seattle_cafes, Starbucks, third_wave

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Quick!: name a city that’s surrounded by the exquisite natural beauty of mountains and seas, with brightly painted houses that decorate quaint neighborhoods, with great food everywhere you turn, with a nearby wine country consisting of hundreds of vineyards and many nationally renowned restaurants, with hipsters who frequent farmers’ markets in transitional neighborhoods, with a [...]

Tags: cafe_reviews, cape_town_cafes, cappuccino, coffee_cupping, ethiopian_coffee, flat_white, flavored_coffees, origin_coffee_roasting, peets_coffee, quality_standards, south_africa_coffee, Starbucks, WEGA, wine_analogy, world_cup

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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 [...]

Tags: acf_cups, best_coffee, blue_bottle, chris_baca, embarcadero, espresso_review, frog_hollow_farm, home_roasting, james_freeman, la_marzocco, nuova_point, peets_coffee, Starbucks, third_wave, verve

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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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This spacious café, oddly decorated with bike frames, lies on the north end of the Sausalito strip. Its name is pronounced “CHEE-bo”, Italian for “food.” (Though we did find an amusing online reference where someone suggested it is pronounced “SHEE-Bow” — which sounds more like M&M-Mars for “decommissioned cat food“.) There are a few outdoor [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, coffee_chains, espresso_review, la_marzocco, marin_cafes, maui_moka, melitta_bar, nuova_point, peets_coffee, Starbucks

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Has it really been a couple weeks since our last third wave rant? A few years after we thought this topic was dead and buried, lately newbie third wave coffee articles have been cropping up in local newspapers like teenage vampire profiteers. London, Oakland, and now Vancouver: Indie cafés perfectly poised to quench coffee aficionados’ [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, cafe_cleanliness, coffee_chains, coffee_marketing, consistency, mom-and-pop-coffee, peets_coffee, quality_standards, ritual_roasters, sammy_piccolo, sf_cafes, Starbucks, third_wave, vancouver_cafes

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