Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Over the years, we’ve dropped notes about New York City’s coffee culture: from its origins as a desolate wasteland through its more recent redemption. Like the awkward and homely tomboy who first gussies herself up for the debutant ball, in the past year New York City has been running a major publicity campaign to promote [...]

We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963. In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are [...]

We had originally posted this as an addendum to our recent review of the new, more permanent installment of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in the Ferry Building Marketplace. However, the strange phenomenon of the Gibraltar deserves its very own post. Originating here in San Francisco, the Gibraltar has since spread to Los Angeles (Intelligentsia [...]

For the second of our three-part installment on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we examine some of coffee’s biggest qualitative fads going today: Single-origin coffees Medium roasts The heavy-handed use of cuppings We’ll examine a little of why we must get past these fads for accessible quality coffee to [...]

We’ve all been told that coffee’s self-fabricated Third Wave has brought many improvements and options to our enjoyment of coffee. Whether you subscribe to this wave theory or not, quality coffee has experienced an unmistakable renaissance over the past decade or two. Of course, the same could be said for olives, olive oil, vinegar, cheese, [...]

One way to learn how important coffee is to some people is to sit in a jury room under bailiff lock & key without coffee for 7 1/2 hours. This pretty much describes my current existence at the aforementioned SF Glamour Slammer. I’m tempted to sneak in my own personal French press — if not [...]

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 [...]

While I’ll be checking out Barista Coffee in India, Minneapolis will be hosting this year’s U.S. Barista Championship during the SCAA conference this weekend. Yesterday, the host city’s hometown paper, the Star Tribune, published a rather lengthy article on the event: The great barista battle is brewing. It’s a story that’s been covered dozens, if [...]

Sometimes it’s quite revealing to see America through foreign eyes. Case and point with a post today on an Italian blog that covers the subject of tourism in the good ol’ U.S. of A.: Guida USA – Info, foto e video. – » L’espresso “solo” da Starbucks. It gave me a chance to put my [...]

The Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano (INEI), or the National Italian Espresso Institute, was born with the certification of quality standards for the Italian Espresso in 1998. Today they announced new certification standards for the Cappuccino: Agenzia Giornalistica Italia – News In English – Italian Products: Cappuccino Obtains Certificate of Quality. Organizations such as the INEI [...]