Your Guide for Craft Coffee
Tartine Manufactory, located at 595 Alabama St in the former Heath Ceramic warehouse in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA made its debut in August as Tartine’s long awaited second brick and mortar. While marking it as the latest bread mecca, the company has also established a coffee brand – Coffee Manufactory. We spoke with Maja Vojnovic and Chris Jordan, the team behind the venture. …
I flew West recently with my family to catch a glimpse of what it would look like to transplant ourselves to San Francisco, and more specifically, what it would look like to be planted in the Sunset. Amidst our travels, we were fortunate enough to be staying nearby Andytown Coffee Roasters, a shop six blocks from the ocean, and 1 block from my heart.
The Outer sunset, with its walkable neighborhoods, ocean view, and Andytown Coffee, kindled an aroma reminiscent of all the things we love about the Midwest. Okay… so we don’t have an ocean view in Kentucky, but Andytown brought the same enchantment of a local roastery joined with a close community that we had experienced at Sunergos in our hometown. It’s the kind of place that you might meet a friend for coffee, or ask a girl to prom via some well placed latte art.…
Any entrepreneur will agree that steady growth in innovating new products is hard to maintain. Tyler Deeb could have easily walked away from one of the most successful playing cards Kickstarters of all time to return to a safe desk job. But he decided he was all in, and has returned to Kickstarter with an innovative coffee brew method. SAY WHAT?!? That’s right. Misc Goods Co. has partnered with Quills Coffee consultant, home roaster extraordinaire, and Coffee Compass guest blogger Chris Heiniger to bring you Coil, a cold brew coffee maker.
Coil is the first brew method of its kind, and can cool freshly brewed coffee from essentially boiling temperatures to near 48° in under 4 minutes without ever touching ice. Deeb explains…
Has the Hario V60 gone out of style, or has the Kalita wave started to win the pour over war? The answer to that question might still be disputable, but Intelligentsia has always had our hearts, and shows us how to brew on the Hario V60 like hipsters in this two minute video featuring some chill wave music by Cale Parks. And sorry, you won’t be able to see Jesse Raub’s beautiful face, but you can check out him eating pizza among other things on his twitter account.
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In the wake of the Handsome exodus, Los Angeles found itself with seasoned baristas looking to open new coffee shops. Handsome co-founder Tyler Wells has done just that with Blacktop, an espresso bar in the Arts District of Downtown L.A. We journeyed through the red sea to discover if there was manna from heaven awaiting us on the opposite shore.
Blacktop coffee is the archetypal stop-n-go coffee shop. We expected a minimalist setup, but were impressed to find…
Our intimate coffee community in Louisville recently lost one of its brightest young coffee professionals to the coffee Mecca known as Seattle. We were excited to catch up with Chris Elliott at SCAA and ask him a few questions about his new role at Slayer Espresso.
Usually, my work here fits quite neatly in a couple of categories: marketing and content. My job is to make Slayer look good, mostly through social media and writing for our website. Slayer is a small company, though, so I wear a lot of hats. Actually, I joke that I own the hat store. That should hint at the range of my work. Also, isn’t there a word for “hat store”? Let me ask @hermitudinous. Anyway, I’ve joined some serious momentum because the product has already made a lot of noise and the brand’s image is somewhat established. That makes my job a lot easier. And, yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing right now. I’m crazy about coffee, but I really enjoy this unique view of the industry – from behind a desk, that is. I like to write and it turns out that there’s a lot to say about …
For long time readers of the Compass, you might have guessed that we enjoy participating in every step of the coffee process, including roasting. After I began getting into iOS app development, I started searching for a project to cut my teeth on. That project is RoastWatch.
RoastWatch, a portmanteau of “Roasting” and “Wristwatch”, is a simple, yet powerful iOS tool to help you track and log your coffee roast profiles. It was designed…
I was recently chatting with a friend about some of the variables that go into brewing coffee. I started explaining the process of how I begin by weighing my coffee, then boiling filtered water using an electric kettle, and then I check the temperature with my thermometer. “Whoa,” he interjected. “That’s a little much.” After explaining the importance of temperature on coffee extraction, he still was a little skeptical, but was interested to know how this might actually affect the end product: a delicious cup of craft coffee.
It’s conversations like this that give us satisfaction to recommend the coffee products we use every day and is one of the main reasons we started the Coffee Compass. But enough talk of these idyllic, blogger-producing conversations, you wanna know about this shiny new, affordable thermometer: the ThermoPop. …
Scott Rao needs no introduction for most of our readers. His landmark book The Professional Barista’s Handbook has influenced the current generation of coffee professionals perhaps more than any other single resource. His books have been formative for our own coffee education, so we were excited for the opportunity to ask him a few questions.
I wrote my first book because I had some free time after selling a business and had always been frustrated as a barista that there were no good resources for learning. After 14 years of full time work owning cafes, I felt I was ready to contribute to the industry’s knowledge base, and spent a few months educating myself in the local university’s physics library before writing the professional barista’s handbook.
Unfortunately, I don’t …
