A Nice Cuppa

Once upon a time, all the diet sodas in all the land were chock full of saccharine, and all the diet soda drinkers were oblivious to any broken, skittish lab rats strung out in testing facilities with ugly malignancies of all sorts of horridness, spawned from that very same saccharine.
But the saying goes, ???Ignorance is […]

Call it the coffee lover in me, but I can remember my very first Starbucks Frappuccino. Believe me it has been quite a few years ago, but from that very first taste I was hooked. The same goes for my first spoonful of Starbucks ice cream, it was literally love at first bite. […]

Every week, I find myself in the coffee aisle of my grocery store, all sense of time lost, gazing at the wall of fresh coffees. I try to find a new bean or blend every week, and have really enjoyed all my new findings. But some days, I???m just tired. I have […]

I was so excited by my new arrival of Peruvian Swiss Water Processed Decaf beans from The Merchants of Green Coffee that I toasted these babies up almost to the point of ash. Oops. Apparently, these beans don’t tolerate much heat and while they didn’t even get to the second crack (my usual […]

With last weekend???s holiday, I felt a yin for a summery coffee treat. Having only recently discovered that I do in fact enjoy good espresso (as opposed to the BAD espresso I???ve tried in the past), I was tempted by a pint of Ciao Bella Espresso Gelato.
Always a sucker for web research, I […]

There???s little in the food and beverage world that has not been revitalized in recent years with an ???artisan??? approach. Perhaps this is because revisiting inspired homemade cooking or brewing conjures nostalgia, quality, authenticity, and a certain kind of emotion. We can eat ???artisan??? pizza and imagine little old ladies kneading dough in […]

Have you ever broken the carafe to your coffee maker while washing it and wished to yourself that you didn’t have to deal with that stupid pot in order to have your daily coffee? Or if you’re a klutz like me, maybe you’ve repeatedly burned your hand on the heating plate. Well I’ve […]

I was wandering around one of Oakland???s big tourist traps, Jack London Square. The main strip of stores and restaurants are mostly chains and less than exciting. Pizza Uno, Starbucks inside the Barnes and Noble, Subway, nothing that can???t be found in any suburban shopping center. And like most coffee drinkers out […]

The food industry has been abuzz in a major way lately about green tea. It seems everyone from Coca-Cola, to Lipton, to Snapple, to Starbucks and countless companies in between is jumping on the green tea bandwagon. But it looks like white tea might just start a craze pretty soon too. White […]

I’ve been on a bit of a food-lit kick over the last couple of months, so when I finished up my last one, Real Food by Nina Planck, I wasn’t sure where to go next. Then I stumbled upon The Devil’s Cup, a quick read on the history of coffee.

“Devil’s Cup” (Stewart Lee Allen)

In it, […]