Local San Francisco NPR affiliate recently interviewed the owners of leading cafes in the Bay Area, including James Freeman of Blue Bottle, Jeremy Tooker of Four Barrel, and Eileen Hassi of Ritual. One of our favorite coffee bloggers had this to say about the affair:
The radio program played out like your typical coffee innovator/”third wave“/bleeding-edge routine that we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. While a bit heavy on the Coffee 101 — particularly when callers asked common FAQ-type questions that have been answered on the Internet 20,000 times over already — KQED produced a good program overall.
James Freeman noted Italy’s “industrialized system of near-universal adequacy,” which is a different but accurate way of summing up our long-held beliefs that outstanding coffee in Italy is almost as hard to find as unacceptable coffee. Other covered topics included coffeehouses eliminating WiFi, Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum inventing the latte, the Gibraltar, and even James Freeman designating home roasting as coffee’s “geeky lunatic fringe.”
Listen to the whole interview right here on Sprudge.com:
