t o n x . o r g

I finished posting photos from my amazing April trip to Guatemala where I met facilitators and producers from a project working on quality improvement for small coffee farmers in Huehuetenango, funded by Slow Food.

Starbucks buying Clover is becoming a publicity boon to “third wave” coffee. Nearly all of the many […]

Yesterday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz took the stage at their annual meeting announcing five new initiatives and -aping an Apple stevenote- a surprise “one more thing”… Starbucks has purchased Seattle’s Coffee Equipment Company, maker of the Clover. While the event (broadcast live on SBUX website) lacked the polish of Apple, you have to credit […]

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few days with Jon Ferguson of recently minted microroaster Cultiva Coffee. “Nebraska isn’t quite HELL…” he told me during our email exchange about the possibility of my coming to Lincoln for a meeting of the minds and some roast profiling jujitsu. From the favorably […]

Intelligentsia’s Sunset Junction coffeebar (finally) opened its doors to the public today at noon. More about the place later, but you can check out some pics here.
Tags:  

The Hoff with his lovely pit crew of Stephen and Anette face the cameras on the L.A. stop of their recent whirlwind tour.
Coffee nerds can chalk up yet another reason to envy U.K. barista James Hoffmann; prolific blogger, donut alchemist, brilliant photographer, ladies’ man, and now World Barista Champion.
James is exceptional in that he […]

I recently had the pleasure of spending some quality time among the bean fiends at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco, a city which continues to charm me with each increasingly frequent visit. When I arrived on Friday night (back on July 20) Ritual was hosting the Bay Area ‘Spro Down*, closing shop early and […]

I’ve been maintaining internet silence on the particulars of Intelligentsia’s L.A. rollout, not wanting to say too much until we are closer to a firm opening date. But for my eight remaining readers who want a peek at what all our fuss is about, I’d like to alert you to our roasting works […]

Last weekend I was in icy Chicago to attend the belated Intelligentsia holiday party. Aside from the always inspiring conspiring with colleagues, the highlights of the trip include sleep deprivation, cold weather, too much alcohol, an unshakable common cold, deafeningly loud music, clothes that smell of cigarettes, and my first experience of blood sausage. […]

Last weekend Kyle and I snuck into Vancouver BC with Intelli honcho Doug Zell, the Suge Knight of coffee, for an epic west coast coffee crawl. In three days time we would aim to hit every major coffeebar on the west coast from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and on down to San Francisco, […]

I scrooged away much of my Soltsmas in front of my laptop failing to write up a coherent epilogue of the many lessons I learned in my week of guestblogging about coffee on Dethroner.
Mostly I learned that writing is hard. I had an ambitious list of articles I wanted to crank out and barely […]