Coffee Tao

New York coffeeshop Roasting Plant Coffee Company is pioneering an interesting design for the sale and delivery of their coffee–by turning the entire store into a coffee machine. Dubbed the “Javabot”, in truth it seems to be really just the various aspects of a typical roasting plant and retail shop joined together by pneumatic […]

[I haven’t gone anywhere…for some reason WordPress keeps eating my posts. Going to try to tackle this technical issue but if it seems like there’s a recent posting drought that’s why. -a]
The UK paper The Guardian ran a story today about a “50 GBP cup of espresso” (about $80), served at the Peter […]

Starbucks announced the other day that it has bought the Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the much-ballyhooed Clover brewing machine, for an undisclosed sum. Apparently Starbucks intends to put Clovers in all but the smallest stores, as part of Howard Schultz’s overall push to increase quality in his stores and slow the recent but […]

In a nod to the classic style of apprenticeship from ye olden days, the Lincoln, Nebraska, coffeeshop Cultiva Coffee is offering a literal apprenticeship program for baristas, roasters, and even managers.
By “classic” I mean that applicants would travel to Lincoln and stay in the owners’ home, working at the shop 30 hours a week in […]

In the wake of the announced Starbucks closures today for barista retraining (”re”-training?), local Seattle independent roasters Caffe Vita are taking advantage of the theoretical masses of caffeine-less coffee drinkers by offering free coffee and espresso at all of their locations during the three hours that every Starbucks will be closed–5:30-8:30pm PST.
It’s a sly move […]

Researchers and chemical engineers at Nestle in Switzerland have invented a machine that analyzes the gas espresso gives off when heated, “translating” the ion compositions into taste notes like “roasted, flowery, woody, toffee and acidity.” It’s imaginatively called an “electronic taster,” and was originally conceived as a quality control device for the major players in […]

Another recent article in the New York Times describes a Starbucks closing down across the street from an indie coffee shop in Kansas City. For the first time the trend of Starbucks pushing out small shops seems to be reversing, and lagging sales and a stale formula has caused Howard Schultz to consider shutting […]

An article in the New York Times highlights the Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco and its interesting recent purchase–a $20,000 coffee brewing contraption imported from Japan.
Using halogen lamps for heat and enough glass bulbs to make any mad scientist proud, the “siphon bar” as its called uses a brewing principle similar to a stove-top […]

Even if, coffee-wise, you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground these past few months, you might have missed the press release that came out in November announcing the founding of R Miguel Coffees and its, er, unique method of marketing.
In almost any industry requiring a degree of craft, from making cupcakes to speaker boxes, […]

If you thought there weren’t nearly enough coffees being created from animal dung, now we have Jacu Bird coffee from South America. Like the palm civet that creates Kopi Luwak coffee, the Jacu flies through Brazilian coffee plantations picking (in theory) the ripest coffee cherries and passing the seeds undigested, which are then […]