Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

In the eight years since we started CoffeeRatings.com, we’ve been patiently waiting for something better. After all, we built CoffeeRatings.com out of frustration over a lack of useful quality information about area coffeehouses in a semi-structured, objective-criteria-driven format. So you’d think we’d be encouraged by the acute rise in venture-capital-funded code monkeys who promise to [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, food_trucks, four_barrel, gibraltar, mr_coffee, rancilio, social_networking, Starbucks, tartine_bakery, yelp, zagat

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That’s the question UK-based marketing consultancy tried to answer on their blog recently: Coffee Marketing: Why So Romantic? | Market Sentinel. The firm was approached by a company attempting to launch a new brand of coffee, and they wanted to know the subjects of public conversations concerning coffee in social media and other public contexts. [...]

Tags: coffee_marketing, consumer_marketing, social_networking

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We smelled a familiar rat the first time we read it: I Am Jonathan’s Starbucks Card: A Social Payment Experiment (With Free Coffee) | TechCrunch. A programmer/writer publicly offers up his Starbucks Card as a social experiment for people around the world to contribute to and withdraw from his pre-paid Starbucks account. It just sounded [...]

Tags: consumer_marketing, fraud, social_networking, Starbucks

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Over the years we’ve read a lot of coffee articles. And ever since feedback forms became commonplace on the Internet, we’ve also read a lot of user comments on these posts. At least enough for us to identify 10 common archetypes among coffee article commenters on the Internet — analogous to the ever-popular coffee shop [...]

Tags: caffeine_addiction, coffee_costs, fair_trade, home_espresso, home_roasting, media, pid, social_networking, Starbucks, travel_coffee

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Online social media is hardly new. Online BBSes have existed since the 1970s. Even yours truly geeked out for a bit on packet radio in the 1980s. But today we have reached a sort of critical mass on the Internet where, like sex and drugs in the 1960s, “everyone is doing it”. Except that “everyone” [...]

Tags: coffee_marketing, consumer_marketing, social_networking, Starbucks

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It may have been a while, but we have reviewed employee espresso bars before. What’s unusual this time is that the espresso bar doesn’t belong to a coffee business. But when said business is slinging shots of Barefoot Coffee Roasters beans out of UNIC Twin machines, we take an interest. The company in question is [...]

Tags: astra, barefoot_roasters, espresso_review, google, mazzer, mountain_view_coffee, paper_cups, social_networking, UNIC, user_ratings, user_reviews, yelp

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Now that we’ve caught your attention with the sensationalist title, we’ve had a thought that has been milling around in our heads for quite a while. All this talk about a supposed Third Wave in quality coffee (it truly is that hard for us to restrain our contempt for that term) seems to have coincided [...]

Tags: Barista, barista_bias, barista_championships, barista_magazine, fair_trade, social_networking

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