Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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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This has long been considered something of a San Luis Obispo County establishment. In the early 1990s, a couple friends of the owner, Randy Coates, operated the original Uptown Espresso in Seattle. Mr. Coates later paid $1 for the rights to slap that name on his own SLO café. He has since renamed his chain [...]

Tags: coffee_cups, espresso_review, la_marzocco, peets_coffee, san_luis_obispo_cafes

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Thanks to Tim of espressophile fame for giving us a heads-up on this article posted yesterday from GQ magazine: The Most Important Drink of Your Day: Restaurants + Bars: GQ. Tim got his heads-up from the guys down at Verve Coffee Roasters, who are among the handful of regional coffee shops highlighted in this best-of [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, folgers, hills_bros, peets_coffee, ritual_roasters, Starbucks, third_wave, verve

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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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Not a day goes without us coming across a story about how the sky is falling on retail quality coffee. For example, ABC News laments, “How do you save on coffee in tough times?” Today the Chicago Tribune ran a semi-humorous column titled “Brother, can you spare (buying) a double latte?” Each one of these [...]

Tags: 4_dollar_coffee_myth, cafe_bustelo, home_espresso, lavazza, peets_coffee, recession, Starbucks

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We have to admit: marketers of whole foods and commodities don’t have it easy. Product marketing is so much easier when you can reformulate and industrially process something with a bogus health claim and slap a “New!” logo on the packaging. It gets even easier when you can inject exotic substances with a “newly discovered” [...]

Tags: bloggers, coffee_marketing, folgers, peets_coffee, recession, Starbucks, web2.0

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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, [...]

Tags: 49th_parallel, counter_culture_coffee, gimme_coffee, intelligentsia, metropolis_coffee, panama_esmeralda, peets_coffee, sant_eustachio, stumptown, third_wave, wine_analogy

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We’ve long made it a policy to not cover superfluous news stories on Starbucks here because, well, they’ve long been irrelevant to quality coffee. But here’s one from Down Under today that is: Starbucks to close 61 Australian stores, cut 685 jobs | The Daily Telegraph. Now we like looking for the hidden story behind [...]

Tags: australia, australia_coffee, peets_coffee, quality_standards, Starbucks

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Today the SF Chronicle posted an impressively long article on the state of quality coffee roasting in the Bay Area: ROAST WITH THE MOST / A new generation of Bay Area coffee roasters pushes the perfect cup to the next level. It’s a remarkable piece, given its breadth. It lightly touches on everything from the [...]

Tags: alfred_peet, blue_bottle, clover_brewer, coffee_roasters, coffee_roasting, four_barrel, peets_coffee, probat, ritual_roasters, single_origin_espresso, stumptown, third_wave

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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 [...]

Tags: Barista, chicago_cafes, chicago_coffee, clover_brewer, espresso_review, intelligentsia, la_marzocco, peets_coffee, Starbucks

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