Posted by TheShot on 24 Jul 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 06 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues
A viral video is going around these days on “The Coffee Wars of San Francisco”. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek with its Ken-Burns-documentary-style humor — though that largely reminds us of how much Ken Burns can lull us to sleep like a bottle of brandy. While the mockumentary oscillates between the mildly funny and the painfully [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 17 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, CoffeeRatings.com, Local Brew, Quality Issues
Frog Hollow Farm reserves a rather anonymous place in the retail coffee history of San Francisco, but it was a watershed for the coffee quality in this city. As much as we roll our eyes at the hackneyed and abused third wave term, by many definitions (theirs, and definitely not ours) this was SF’s first [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 10 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Roasting
We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 07 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Machine
The former One World Cafe needed a serious upgrade, and this is it. Gone are the beat-up furniture and odd house plants that made this space look like a medical marijuana co-op in aging neglect. The place now looks more like a sushi bar, with clean, angular lines, dark and solid colors, nicer wood floors, [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 20 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Quality Issues
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 [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 03 Aug 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
Holy crap. This is one of those rare finds where a small town and a strip mall can produce some outstanding coffee and espresso that competes with the best. Although we were aware of Coffee Cat’s elevated reputation among the Scotts Valley locals when passing through, at first we were guilty of dismissing it relative [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 02 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Machine, Roasting
Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that. If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 15 May 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Roasting
Opening just a week ago — in the space previously occupied by the Illy shop, Caffé Il Latte — this tiny café is the first in San Francisco to use beans from Santa Cruz-based Verve Coffee Roasters. The tiny space relies on mirrored walls to add depth, and there is a little bit of a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 31 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Café Society, Foreign Brew
In the nearly two decades that we’ve been visiting Santa Cruz, they’ve arguably lacked a vibrant café that excels at both coffee and as a student hang out. Recent café openings in town, such as Verve Coffee Roasters, have helped tremendously — but at Verve the focus is squarely on the coffee. (Not necessarily a [...]
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