Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Perhaps the biggest irony is that nobody should ever need a CoffeeCON. As we posted last year, on the same day as the inaugural CoffeeCON 2012, we were instead attending the Grand Tasting of La Paulée de San Francisco: a $300-per-person consumer Burgundy appreciation event backed by a tremendous amount of wine industry support and [...]

This bakery/café first opened in 2010 as a joint venture of the Goody Goodie bakery and John Quintos, who’s behind Cento, Special Xtra, and Vega. It was originally named “StarStream,” and the coffee routinely followed the Quintos rubber-stamp formula of small La Marzocco Linea espresso machines and Blue Bottle Coffee. However, as the location developed [...]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Saturday, February 25, 2012 offered a curious contrast between the very different worlds of consumer appreciation for wine and coffee. For the former, I attended La Paulée de San Francisco 2012 — arguably the most over-the-top consumer wine event in America. For the [...]

For this installment of comic relief Friday, we bring you the coffee critic wheel. You’re probably well aware of the coffee flavor wheel, which borrowed heavily from the wine aroma wheel in the wine tasting world. However, you might not be aware of wine vintner Janet Trefethen’s (of Trefethen Family Vineyards) Standardized System of Wine [...]

Yesterday we came across a post where a Boston Globe writer implored winemakers to be more like their coffee counterparts: A lesson in winemaking – straight from the espresso bar . . . – By the glass – Wine News, Views & Reviews – Boston.com. It wouldn’t be the first time coffee’s wine analogy ran [...]

Several months after we declared that coffee’s golden age is over, famed Illy barista-in-chief, Giorgio Milos, posted this in The Atlantic today: America’s Golden Age of Coffee: Remarkably Like Italy’s Past – Giorgio Milos – Life – The Atlantic. You might recall Mr. Milos ruffling a few New World coffee feathers last year in The [...]

We’ve been lamenting the sorry state of restaurant coffee in these pages since 2005. But let it be known that, as of this moment forward, we have officially given up on the possibility of ever being reliably served good coffee in American restaurants. Sure, there have been a few successes and battles won along the [...]

Growing up as a teenager, I always hated those “Battle of the Bands” contests. Because — despite my odd musical tastes, from the Dream Syndicate to Mötorhead, at a time when most teens wanted the inoffensive sounds of Huey Lewis & the News — I quickly learned that these contests were never about talent. They [...]

Many in the coffee industry speak volumes about wanting to market themselves to the public as the “new wine.” But if we examine the practices the industry has taken on to accomplish any of this, it has failed miserably on nearly all fronts. What becomes all too clear is that the coffee industry either doesn’t [...]

As Americans have ravaged through anything edible from the surface of the planet like a biblical plague of locusts, you can’t argue that we have become rather fat and bored. So as consumers, we have resorted to behaviors suggestive of infants who sit in their own mess sticking various things in their mouths until something [...]