Posted by TheShot on 30 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew
This neighborhood café opened in late 2009 with the idea of serving sexual perversions and coffee in the same location. This is one of the more obvious examples of how coffeeshops are being fetishized in the Bay Area. We’ve written about espresso bars in bicycle shops, laundromats, video stores, runners shops, motorcycle shops, gardening supply [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 17 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Foreign Brew
At its best, Yountville is the New World epicenter for quality food and wine. At its worst, Yountville lays its claim to food & wine prominence through a fabricated culture of European fakery (more on that in a future post). One of the exceptions in town to this latter rule is this this odd curiosity [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 12 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew
The Mission is one of SF’s best neighborhoods. We don’t necessarily mean Mission Street, however: home to BART’s Plasticuffs Station and a decent assortment of angry heroin addicts. We’re talking about 24th Street — a working class neighborhood with a strong immigrant community, but without many of Mission Street’s rougher edges. Decent coffee is now [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 28 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Starbucks
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’ [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
MSN City Guides recently joined the ever-popular year-end parade of Internet-friendly Top 10 lists: America’s Best Coffee – 1 – MSN City Guides. As if to show Bon Appétit that they, too, can list their favorites without the bother of any supporting criteria, MSN’s editors also took an early holiday and let two additional nominees [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 16 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: CoffeeRatings.com, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
Today’s East Bay Express published a good, and long-overdue, cover story on some of the quality coffee changes going on in our fair East Bay: Surfing Coffee’s “Third Wave” | Feature | East Bay Express. Its use of the Third Wave crutch is unfortunate, but also par for the course these days. Meanwhile, we will [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 27 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
San Luis Obispo County is not known for a whole lot, even among Californians. There’s Hearst Castle, Cal Poly in SLO proper, and the burgeoning Paso Robles wine growing region — or what the locals simply call “Paso”. But as is happening in many lesser-known regions around the country, SLO County’s appreciation for better food [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 20 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew
With all this talk of West Coast roasters creeping their operations out East, a news story from today’s Jamaica Observer was a bit of a head-turner. The article seemed to imply that Ritual Coffee Roasters is setting up shop in Jamaica — and we don’t mean Jamaica in Queens, NYC: Rituals Coffee to set up [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 09 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
This small-bite Italian eatery and wine bar on Lower Haight arrived on the scene in the Spring of ’08, taking over what was frequently a campaign office for local politicians. They have limited seating in front and plenty more in back, with both dining areas separated by a large, accommodating bar with stool seating. Despite [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 30 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
Opening in early 2009, this is an unusual space in that most people cannot make it out: “Is it a café? Is it an event space? Is it a restaurant? Is it a wine bar?” Well, it’s all of the above inside an old, long, barn-like structure across from the diploma factory California Culinary Academy [...]
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