Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

On the continuing theme of New Yorkers being years behind on their coffee trends, yesterday the New York Times published an article on the improving quality of decaffeinated coffees: New Breed of Brewers of No Buzz – NYTimes.com. It is a slightly updated and expanded version of an L.A. Times piece we wrote about in [...]

Stirring a bit of the coffee world today is this piece from TIME magazine: Stumptown Coffee vs. Starbucks: Portland, Seattle Rivals – TIME. If Josh Ozersky’s headline of “Is Stumptown the New Starbucks — or Better?” seems oddly familiar, it’s because his article conceptually (and shamelessly) recycled Ethan Epstein’s piece for the New York Press [...]

It’s the kind of statement sure to earn protests from many a New Yorker: some consider Yountville, CA to be the culinary capital of America. An outrageous assertion? Not necessarily. At the heart of the Napa Valley wine country, Yountville is home to what many call the nation’s greatest restaurant in The French Laundry. It [...]

Today’s The Globe and Mail (Toronto) featured an article on the coming growing pains for Vancouver’s Caffè Artigiano: Coffee chain tackles expansion conundrum – The Globe and Mail. For those unfamiliar, Caffè Artigiano still represents the best espresso shot we’ve ever had — produced by the hands of barista savant, Sammy Piccolo. Pulled in 2003, [...]

This spacious café, oddly decorated with bike frames, lies on the north end of the Sausalito strip. Its name is pronounced “CHEE-bo”, Italian for “food.” (Though we did find an amusing online reference where someone suggested it is pronounced “SHEE-Bow” — which sounds more like M&M-Mars for “decommissioned cat food“.) There are a few outdoor [...]

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’ [...]

We’re rather shameless about our love for the espresso and cafés in Torino, Italy. So we could not pass on today’s travel article in The Guardian (UK): Lose the froth: Turin’s best cafes | Travel | The Guardian. So why do we love the espresso and cafés in Torino so much? To start with: grand [...]

Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article on Illycaffè‘s quiet expansion in the U.S. coffeehouse market: Illy Uses Backdoor to Take On Starbucks in U.S. – WSJ.com. Anytime someone tries to sell coffee in this country, the knee-jerk media presumption is that they’re going to “Take On Starbucks“™. Illy has always publicly stated that they [...]

Thanks to Tim of espressophile fame for giving us a heads-up on this article posted yesterday from GQ magazine: The Most Important Drink of Your Day: Restaurants + Bars: GQ. Tim got his heads-up from the guys down at Verve Coffee Roasters, who are among the handful of regional coffee shops highlighted in this best-of [...]

A little over two years ago, we lamented the state of populist retail home espresso by reviewing what we thought was one of the better options at the time, the Nespresso C180 Le Cube: The Home Espresso Machine Blues: Rating today’s state of consumer espresso machines. Besides having a name that sounded regrettably familiar to [...]