The Reading Room

Is one ever too young to enjoy the coffee shop environment? Do kids belong in the café? Is the babycino too cute? Whatever you might think of kids in the coffee shop, a controversy of sorts developed recently in Australia...

Bring back the holidays. What I am drinking now is Velton’s holiday blend from Velton’s Coffee Roasting Company.  You may find this odd since the “holidays” does not usually mean Valentine’s day together with President’s day.  You may also find...

As I sit here drinking a cup of americano made from the La Pavoni lever machine using a nicely roasted Rwanda coffee, I can not help but to reflect a little bit about this week. It has been an incrediblely...

 A well-organized home coffee station makes better coffee easier to make every day. Here is how to plan the layout, what equipment to include at every budget level, and how to store your beans and gear for maximum freshness and convenience.

This is a review of my initial impressions of Paradise coffee roasters Espresso Havana.  It is fairly fresh – 3 days post roast, so the taste may change dramatically over the next week or so – possibly for the better. ...

Are we in the Golden Age of Coffee? I have been thinking about this as I was looking to order some coffee today, it seems like we might be at one of those very happy convergence points. For coffee this...

The quality of your ground coffee determines your cup before brewing even starts. Grind size, grind consistency, freshness, storage, and whether you grind whole bean or buy pre-ground all affect the result. These 5 factors explain what separates a great cup from a flat one.

I heard recently that an apple have more caffeine than a cup of coffee.  This struck me as a crazy claim so I decided to investigate.  It turns out that it is indeed a crazy claim.  An apple has no...

Because of the increasing chance for me to work as the Monday afternoon barista (a little more here), I spent a some time getting more training from one of the baristas that work at the shop. While I felt pretty...

Like it or not, the Italian-inspired Starbucks started a coffee revolution in the US. The changes introduced there have been brought to cafes almost everywhere, in fifty countries from the Americas to the Middle East and Africa. This week writer...

Apparently, there are people who need to be reminded when to take a coffee break. Now there's an app for that. Caffeine Zone, a new app created by a pair of researchers at Penn State, keeps track of your caffeine...

I was curious about the unique flavor of Bossa from Deep Cello Roasters and how they suggested pulling the shots of it, so I wrote to ask.  I was quite pleased to get the following detailed answer from Justin Kagan...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7062/6878940937_f8d51eebeb.jpg" align="left" width="300" vspace="10px" hspace="10px" height="188" alt="coffee bean candle" />Did you forget today is Valentine's Day and find yourself giftless and destined for the doghouse? If you've got coffee beans, a glass jar and a tealight candle in the house,...

/files/u16346/DSC00183.jpg" height="300" align="left" width="225" hspace="10" /> I know there has been a lot of rave reviews about how good Cremina is and how great the shots it makes. You probably don’t need another post to convince you that it is...

So about three weeks ago I posted about the initial impressions I had with the Mypressi. Since then I’ve gotten swamped with work and haven’t had much of a chance to share anything else about it. So I thought I...

What we are drinking now – Chazzano French roast.  I blogged earlier about the Chazzano’s Papau New Guinea coffee that a friend gave me that I quite enjoyed.  She also brought us a bag of their French Roast.  It is...

I wrote about Antigua Guatemala on a previous blog and Gazy, from Hacienda El Porvenir in Colombia, commented about it. He said: “you are short on talking about colors. I've never seen such a colorful country as Guatemala”. He was...

In my very first blog post here last May, I focused on Orphan Espresso’s PHAROS as an example of the “pursuit of perfection” in manual coffee grinding. As well-built as the PHAROS appears to be, it was not designed for...

Recently I took a delivery of a used Nuova Simonelli Oscar from ebay;. Surprisingly the seller is a forum member and I normally had no problem trusting another fellow member. The caveat though, was that he was selling for his...

I was curious about the effect of coffee and or caffeine on athletics.  Once when I was younger I tried drinking a beer before playing tennis and I was shocked by how much it cut my endurance.  I was in...

I posted a few days back that I got a new scale, the American Weigh 2kg, and I have been loving it thus far as it's vastly superior to the 100 g pocket scale that I had before it.The biggest...