Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Last week, C. Clairborne Ray of the New York Times answered this question as part of the paper’s Q&A feature: bookofjoe: What makes coffee bitter?. (I’m citing it on another blogger’s post instead of the original NY Times source — in case you are religiously opposed to NYT logins.) As the article states, coffee is [...]

According to an article in today’s USA Today, hotels are still slowly catching up on the rest of society when it comes to serving better quality coffee: Upscale coffee selections brewing at more hotels – USATODAY.com. As the article opens, “Good coffee is the next big thing at hotels.” Business travelers, accustomed to better coffee [...]

The uncontrollable urge to assign shamanic powers of eternal life or instant death to coffee are still in full bloom. Last December, we reported on the UK introduction of CoffeeSlender (a.k.a. Café Bulimia), a coffee drink that claimed to help consumers lose weight through something called Svetol — a derivative of green coffee beans. Today [...]

David Lebovitz is a fairly well-known pastry chef and foodie who launched his career through a long tour of duty at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Lately he’s taken on a great interest in making the kind of espresso he can get in Italy — but not in the U.S. as easily. Following his pursuit of [...]

Today the Chicago Maroon, an independent student newspaper of the University of Chicago, published a curious indictment of the Fair Trade movement: Chicago Maroon » Hurting the third world one latte at a time. Being the University of Chicago, the author takes a more world economic view of the issue. While I completely disagree with [...]

Tomorrow’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution nails it with this article headline: Espresso done right is intense — a full-bodied, stop-time moment to savor | ajc.com. Somewhat surprisingly, what follows the headline isn’t half bad either. The author, John Kessler, goes on to note how rare a decent espresso is in this country — and in fancy restaurants [...]

Yesterday’s Sunday Times (London) ran a story concerning McDonald’s UK’s announcement of a coffee supply partnership with the Rainforest Alliance: McDonald’s brews up £1m fair trade deal – Sunday Times – Times Online. At first read, I opted not to add a blog entry on how the Rainforest Alliance served as another alternative example to [...]

In response to the precipitous rise of specialty coffee in recent years, coffee’s traditional Big Four (Nestlé, Sara Lee, Kraft, and Proctor & Gamble) — rather than compete by raising their quality standards — responded instead by seeking cheaper bean stocks to squeeze out more profits. The Vietnamese robusta coffee market rode the wave of [...]

As Frank Sinatra once sang, “They got a lot of coffee in Brazil”. However, the driest winter in two decades is threatening to drop next year’s crop yield by almost a third: Brazilian drought leaves coffee crop high and dry | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle. As the reality of global climate change sinks in, one [...]

Decaffeinated coffee was once treated a lot like robusta: as some kind of crude, faux coffee that caters to consumers with the misfortune of a biological defect. But just as high-quality, expertly prepared robusta beans started appearing on the market from places such as India (for blending into quality roasts for espresso, etc.), decaf coffee [...]