Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Last week brought us yet another coffee article about wine analogies and making the “perfect” (groan) cup: The Art of the Perfect Cup of Coffee | CulturePOP | Ingredients for an Artful Life. What was different about this one is it consisted of an interview with reigning WBC champ Michael Phillips of Chicago’s Intelligentsia. In [...]

Today’s Metro Pulse (Knoxville, TN) published a lengthy-but-interesting piece on Knoxville’s budding local coffee scene: Revenge of the Knoxville (Coffee) Nerds » Metro Pulse. The article includes plenty of common themes we’ve seen many times before — pour-over bars, direct trade, the wine analogy. However, the article succeeds by being non-judgmental while going beyond the [...]

Lately we’ve been thinking about quality coffee’s current obsession with all-things-technology. While there’s arguably more science than art to making good coffee, the current climate seems to have pushed any art aside. It reminds us of civilization at the turn of the 20th century, when society held a common belief that technology was going to [...]

Today’s The Age (Melbourne, Australia) published a less-than-convinced article on the experimental fad of pairing coffees with a meal: Claire’s roast: Coffee matching leaves bitter taste. And Melbourne is a town that famously knows its coffee. For me, the lingering question had been whether the concept of matching food to coffee would work…and based on [...]

Quick!: name a city that’s surrounded by the exquisite natural beauty of mountains and seas, with brightly painted houses that decorate quaint neighborhoods, with great food everywhere you turn, with a nearby wine country consisting of hundreds of vineyards and many nationally renowned restaurants, with hipsters who frequent farmers’ markets in transitional neighborhoods, with a [...]

Saturday’s Chicago Tribune published a pretty good piece on Intelligentsia CEO, Doug Zell: Intelligentsia Coffee’s CEO talks beans – chicagotribune.com. While Doug gets a little loopy (our opinion) in abusing the ever-popular wine analogy for coffee — e.g., espousing such shoehorned ideas as coffee pairings — he’s been a pioneer and leader in areas such [...]

The Annual SCAA Exposition is upon us. This month — in addition to the usual gadget marketing, major sponsorship from suspect brands, and the U.S Barista Championship — the event organizers have added a new Culinary Track: SPECIALTY COFFEE ASSOCIATION ADDS CULINARY TRACK | Articles | Beverages. To quote the SCAA press release [pdf, 27kb]: [...]

Just when you think the profession of the coffee “middleman” was on its way out in this era of the Internet, in come a number of entrepreneurs trying to reintroduce them. What we’re talking about are consumer retailers that intermediate the sale of roasted coffee — with examples that include Citizen Bean, GoCoffeeGo (see Man [...]

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 [...]

This past year, The Atlantic magazine has been no stranger to the subject of coffee. They finish out the year on the topic of coffee tourists: Coffee Worth Traveling For – The Atlantic Food Channel. We’ve always used the phrase coffee tourist in a much more derogatory context — e.g., “kopi luwak is a gag [...]