Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Opening in the Spring of 2008, this remote Ritual location is little more than a counter inside Napa’s relatively new Oxbow Public Market. At first we questioned why the Wine Country needed a Ritual outlet — rather than an expansion of Sonoma-County-based Flying Goat Coffee. But then as we’ve monitored the quality over at The [...]

Regular readers here are familiar with our squawking about Slow Food in this blog for almost three years now. You might even recall our pilgrimage to the Slow Food mothership in Bra, Italy last October. But in case you haven’t seen the orange and black posters everywhere, next weekend Slow Food comes to America for [...]

Today the Daily Herald (Chicago suburbs) republished a Wall Street Journal story (no subscription required!) covering the growing consumer interest in home latte art: Daily Herald | Coffee drinkers show their latte love with artistic creations. The article notably takes a San Francisco bias in its choices for interviewees. However, it properly cites the founder [...]

As we mentioned in our last post a couple days ago, being popular and being good can be two very things. There are few places where this is more apparent than on Web sites that thrive on aggregate public user ratings and reviews. We had intended this article to be about Yelp’s top SF coffee [...]

It’s been a rather sad week for coffee news. An embarrassment, really — with headlines dominated by the ridiculous. There’s Racheal Ray’s TV commercial promoting both Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee and her Death-to-Israel Hamas credentials (though who hasn’t wanted to go jihad on her?). There are vocal members of Christian groups that we now need [...]

Jeremy Tooker, co-founder of Ritual Roasters, had a bit of a falling out with Ritual’s co-owner, Eileen, and he’s pursued his own vision of a quality coffee business in Four Barrel Coffee: no Wi-Fi, no squatting start-ups that can’t pony up rent, just no-frills retail coffee plus a roasting and distribution operation. We admire the [...]

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 [...]

As we hinted in a previous post, San Francisco magazine just published Josh Sens’ story on the more recent evolution of San Francisco’s local coffee scene in its most recent issue: A new buzz | San Francisco online. (There’s even an article featuring CoffeeRatings.com on the back page: The coffee bard | San Francisco online.) [...]

With Spring upon us, that means it’s time for the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC): ‘Attention to every detail’ at Berkeley barista contest – San Jose Mercury News. Starting this past Friday and ending today (check out their photo album), the 2008 WRBC performs a time-honored ritual to select a barista champ representing our [...]

You’ve read the review on Ritual Coffee Roasters’ new Bayview location. But at long last, I finally got to sample one of the few Clover brewer machines in the Bay Area while visiting. Word has it that the Clover brewer was probably the most talked about subject at last week’s SCAA conference. Given how long [...]