Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

San Luis Obispo County is not known for a whole lot, even among Californians. There’s Hearst Castle, Cal Poly in SLO proper, and the burgeoning Paso Robles wine growing region — or what the locals simply call “Paso”. But as is happening in many lesser-known regions around the country, SLO County’s appreciation for better food [...]

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 [...]

Ever since Starbucks announced their outright purchase of the Clover brewer supply, it was a mere matter of time before replacement filter-coffee-brewing setups were anointed by the coffeeshop elite. From the Chicagoist today, at least Intelligentsia seems settled on the Hario ceramic coffee dripper and kettle: More Change Brewing at Intelligentsia – Chicagoist. Ah, yes. [...]

If you’ve noticed the sound of crickets around here lately, you’re not the only one. Sure, we’ve been quietly plodding along at updating our espresso reviews. But the media coverage on coffee over the past few weeks has been boring and uneventful. That is until this week, when we came across two examples of how [...]

For the last installment of our three-part series on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we wrap up by examining two major social fads that have come to identify the Third Wave: The focus on baristas The role of coffee geeks We’ll also touch on why, if quality coffee is [...]

For the second of our three-part installment on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we examine some of coffee’s biggest qualitative fads going today: Single-origin coffees Medium roasts The heavy-handed use of cuppings We’ll examine a little of why we must get past these fads for accessible quality coffee to [...]

We’ve all been told that coffee’s self-fabricated Third Wave has brought many improvements and options to our enjoyment of coffee. Whether you subscribe to this wave theory or not, quality coffee has experienced an unmistakable renaissance over the past decade or two. Of course, the same could be said for olives, olive oil, vinegar, cheese, [...]

At CoffeeRatings.com, we believe that what the end consumer experiences is what matters most, regardless of who is behind the results. But often the story about coffee becomes more of a story about people. Rodger’s Coffee & Tea is a good example of this — where knowing a little of the back story helps provide [...]

The Travel section of today’s New York Times featured an article on the burgeoning cocktail scene in San Francisco’s bars: Journeys – In San Francisco Bars, a Cocktail Is Not Just a Drink – NYTimes.com. What does any of this have to do with coffee? A bit more than you might think, actually. The cocktail [...]

Yesterday, the Seattle Weekly published a lengthy, thoughtful, and somewhat critical article on the exploding fad of consumer coffee cupping: Seattle’s New Way to Fetishize Coffee – Food – Seattle Weekly. As we’ve written here before, the coffee industry has shoehorned many wine analogies onto coffee appreciation. While this shorthand provides a simplistic reference point [...]