Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

In the eight years since we started CoffeeRatings.com, we’ve been patiently waiting for something better. After all, we built CoffeeRatings.com out of frustration over a lack of useful quality information about area coffeehouses in a semi-structured, objective-criteria-driven format. So you’d think we’d be encouraged by the acute rise in venture-capital-funded code monkeys who promise to [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, food_trucks, four_barrel, gibraltar, mr_coffee, rancilio, social_networking, Starbucks, tartine_bakery, yelp, zagat

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Today’s East Bay Express published a good, and long-overdue, cover story on some of the quality coffee changes going on in our fair East Bay: Surfing Coffee’s “Third Wave” | Feature | East Bay Express. Its use of the Third Wave crutch is unfortunate, but also par for the course these days. Meanwhile, we will [...]

Tags: blue_bottle, chowhound, cole_coffee, east_bay_espresso, flying_goat, four_barrel, oakland_espresso, ritual_roasters, taylor_maid, third_wave, yelp

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It may have been a while, but we have reviewed employee espresso bars before. What’s unusual this time is that the espresso bar doesn’t belong to a coffee business. But when said business is slinging shots of Barefoot Coffee Roasters beans out of UNIC Twin machines, we take an interest. The company in question is [...]

Tags: astra, barefoot_roasters, espresso_review, google, mazzer, mountain_view_coffee, paper_cups, social_networking, UNIC, user_ratings, user_reviews, yelp

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As we mentioned in our last post a couple days ago, being popular and being good can be two very things. There are few places where this is more apparent than on Web sites that thrive on aggregate public user ratings and reviews. We had intended this article to be about Yelp’s top SF coffee [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, cafe_reviews, citysearch, coffee_bar, ratings_bias, ritual_roasters, user_ratings, yelp

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This casual café run by Mission locals lives across the street from the slightly newer, and trendier, Sugarlump. That detail alone contributes to an unusual social “halo” surrounding this café — one that forgives the many sins it commits against good coffee. To be honest, the espresso here is quite dreadful. But this place is [...]

Tags: elektra, espresso_review, mission, organic_coffee, overextraction, yelp

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Every time we think about how far we’ve come with the mass cultural awareness and appreciation of specialty coffee in this country, we’re slapped in the face with reminders of how far we still have to go. One perfect example of this is the sorry, antiquated state of the coffee house review — whether in [...]

Tags: cafe_reviews, ratings_bias, tallahassee_cafes, yelp

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We at TheShot may peruse the Internet for headlines, but that doesn’t mean we’ve given up on the printed word. So we took notice of our citation in the latest issue of a local neighborhood paper, Glen Park News: Glen Park News – Summer 2007 [2.9 MB PDF file, page 17]. Although we appreciate the [...]

Tags: burritoeater.com, cafe_bello, coffee_sizes, glen_park, overextraction, yelp

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Today a Salon magazine blog touched on the flaws of the many online review sites: Why a five-star restaurant serves one-star food – Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles – Salon. The writer opens with an anecdote about Yelp — a review site that, in my experience, has long epitomized these flaws (see my [...]

Tags: cafe_reviews, citysearch, ratings_bias, user_ratings, user_reviews, yelp

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I’m a little slow this time around, but not long ago Citysearch.com announced their 2006 readers’ poll winners for the best coffee in San Francisco: Best of Citysearch San Francisco – Best San Francisco Coffee. This is something of an annual tradition, as we reviewed Citysearch’s 2005 coffee winners. (When you think of it, naming [...]

Tags: best_coffee, blue_bottle, cafe_lo_cubano, caffe_roma, caffe_trieste, citysearch, coffee_bean_and_tea_leaf, mr-espresso, peets_coffee, ritual_roasters, tartine_bakery, yelp

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Fair Trade, organic coffee drinkers unite! This former Holey Bagel shop has earned an extremely loyal (dare I even suggest “partially blind”?) following in the central Haight district. On their front door, they boast themselves as the #1 coffee shop in San Francisco on the basis of their reviews on Yelp.com. So they must be [...]

Tags: barista_championships, cafe_customers, cafe_organica, coffee_roasters, espresso_review, fair_trade, haight_ashbury, la_marzocco, mirage, organic_coffee, san_francisco_magazine, wrbc, yelp

4 Comments »