Posted by TheShot on 01 Feb 2012 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
When Trish Rothgeb (née Skeie) first coined the term “Third Wave,” it was supposed to be about enjoying coffee for its own sake. But reading some of the articles posted about coffee in the popular presses lately, we wonder if any Third Wave is really more about purging heretics and enforcing an orthodoxy over a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 01 Jul 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
Pardon the sensationalist headline. (Like nobody has ever done that before.) But here’s something from yesterday’s L.A. Weekly on Demitasse, one of the more anticipated new coffeeshops in the L.A. area, that questions/provokes some of the conventional coffee wisdom of the month: Demitasse Will Not Have Pourover Coffee + Other Twists on the Third Wave [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 31 May 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew, Roasting
It’s a good thing we’re no longer monitoring signs of the impending Apocalypse. But in perhaps yet another sign that quality coffee is at the end of a Golden Age, rumors today of a Stumptown Coffee Roasters buyout: Stumptown Sold Out – The Selling of Stumptown Coffee Roasters – Esquire. Unlike the article’s author (and [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 03 May 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
A couple weeks ago, a regular reader made a very relevant comment on our last post: “You have become very negative. When was the last positive post?” They were completely on target, and we have noticed this trend in ourselves for months now. (See: Coffee Commenter Archetype #10.) The reasons are worth a post here. [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 07 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Machine
This week the pipes and tubes of the Internetz delivered a couple of noteworthy articles on local coffee scenes. The first is a cover story in Portland’s Willamette Week (“Drip City: Everything old is new again in Portland’s coffee scene”). The other is a next-generation rehash of a “favorite coffeehouses” list from the Toronto Star [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 29 Mar 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew
Growing up as a teenager, I always hated those “Battle of the Bands” contests. Because — despite my odd musical tastes, from the Dream Syndicate to Mötorhead, at a time when most teens wanted the inoffensive sounds of Huey Lewis & the News — I quickly learned that these contests were never about talent. They [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Quality Issues, Starbucks
Two articles in the news yesterday highlighted a bit of our thinking about a major divide in coffee formats: espresso and filter coffee. The Puget Sound Business Journal interviewed the sometimes-controversial Illy man, Giorgio Milos: Illy’s master barista challenges us to take a fresh look at Starbucks, Tully’s | Puget Sound Business Journal. The other [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 12 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends
The New York Times published an article this week (due in the NY Times Magazine tomorrow) from its coffee beat regular, Oliver Strand: Japan’s Pour-Over Coffee Wins Converts – NYTimes.com. It’s a relatively effective trend piece — dealing more with pop culture and a sort of social anthropology than anything it says about coffee. But [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 01 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: Machine, Starbucks
In what’s starting to look like a Spy-vs-Spy-like dance between a Starbucks acquisition and the unStarbucks set, Starbucks’ Clover Equipment Company’s latest move is the Precision Pour Over: Clover Pour Over « Why Not? Coffee. (Courtesy of Seattle’s Why Not? Coffee.) As we left off in our story, the once-independent Clover Equipment Company made waves [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 15 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
Today’s Metro Pulse (Knoxville, TN) published a lengthy-but-interesting piece on Knoxville’s budding local coffee scene: Revenge of the Knoxville (Coffee) Nerds » Metro Pulse. The article includes plenty of common themes we’ve seen many times before — pour-over bars, direct trade, the wine analogy. However, the article succeeds by being non-judgmental while going beyond the [...]
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