Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

If you were to read it in the current Roast magazine article (from the Jan-Feb 2012 issue), India is a coffee consumer desert. This week TIME magazine wrote about the entrance of Starbucks in the Indian market almost as if to dismiss any prior coffee consumption there. But after spending three weeks in South India’s [...]

Tags: cafe_coffee_day, caffe_pascucci, coffee_growers, coffee_origin, cortado, espressamente, india_cafes, india_coffee, latte_art, la_marzocco, peets_coffee, south_india_filter_coffee, Starbucks, third_place, third_wave

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Yesterday morning, KQED radio aired an hour-long Forum segment featuring a small round-table of SF coffee “luminaries”: SF’s Coffee Innovators: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. The panel included James Freeman, of Blue Bottle Coffee, Eileen Hassi, of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and an unusually quiet Jeremy Tooker, of Four Barrel Coffee. Much like [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, caffe_mediterraneum, cortado, eileen_hassi, four_barrel, gibraltar, grinders, home_roasting, india_coffee, james_freeman, jeremy_tooker, laptop_zombies, latte_art, peets_coffee, ritual_roasters, Starbucks, third_wave

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Today’s L.A. Weekly featured an interesting bio-piece on father and son L.A. espresso pioneers, Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: Q & A with Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: L.A.’s Single Espresso Origin – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink. You might recognize the Pasquini name for some of their excellent home espresso machines. But the [...]

Tags: caffe_trieste, coffee_milkshakes, coffee_roasting, espresso_machines, faema, la_cimbali, la_marzocco, nespresso, pasquini, sightglass, Starbucks, superautomatic_espresso_machines

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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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Ever eat a hamburger at a 1950s-themed American diner? In Hong Kong? Maybe their waffles didn’t taste like fish sauce, but it’s not uncommon to discover something lost in translation. (E.g., “Why does my hamburger bun taste like rice vinegar?”) On the spectrum of authenticity, this is the culinary equivalent to finding luxury handbags in [...]

Tags: acf_cups, coffee_chains, espresso_review, french_coffee, hario_v60_dripper, la_marzocco, ritual_roasters, Starbucks

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Media profiles of Illycaffè‘s Andrea Illy are commonplace. But this one from today’s The Guardian (UK) is better than most: Andrea Illy: family businessman who’s raising the bar for premium coffee | Business | The Guardian. For one, Mr. Illy talks about the importance of pricing and brand positioning. Regardless of what you think of [...]

Tags: andrea_illy, barista_training, coffee_marketing, consistency, corporate_social_responsibility, fair_trade, illy, misery_market, Starbucks

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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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California’s Santa Barbara County is a lot like the rest of America when it comes to coffee: it should face a tribunal for atrocities committed against the human taste bud. What makes these many crimes particularly heinous are the various local media outlets in these communities that celebrate certain local coffeehouses as some of the [...]

Tags: acf_cups, espresso_review, la_marzocco, mazzer, quality_standards, santa_barbara_cafes, santa_barbara_coffee, Starbucks, verve

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The story of coffee at Specialty’s Café & Bakery reflects the story of San Francisco’s consumer tastes for retail coffee. In the beginning, there was Faema + Prebica — and it was weak A decade ago, Specialty’s ran a small chain of bakery/cafés with coffee service areas. Some locations, like this one on Pine St., [...]

Tags: acf_cups, big_four_coffee, blue_bottle, caffe_artigiano, espresso_review, faema, financial_district, franke, frog_hollow_farm, hario_v60_dripper, intelligentsia, la_marzocco, Starbucks, superautomatic_espresso_machines

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It’s a good thing we’re no longer monitoring signs of the impending Apocalypse. But in perhaps yet another sign that quality coffee is at the end of a Golden Age, rumors today of a Stumptown Coffee Roasters buyout: Stumptown Sold Out – The Selling of Stumptown Coffee Roasters – Esquire. Unlike the article’s author (and [...]

Tags: clover, clover_brewer, pour_over_coffee, Starbucks, stumpgate, stumptown

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