"For decades, Japan simply imported the wares of foreign cultures, but recession has led to invention. The country has begun creating the finest American denim, French cuisine and Italian espresso in the world. Now is the time to visit."

"During the robust economy of the '80s, Japan's exports ruled, and the country would import the best that money could buy from the rest of the globe, including Italian chefs and French sommeliers. Which made Japan an haute bourgeoisie heaven where luxury manufacturers from the West expected skyrocketing sales forever.

But now 20-plus years of recession have killed that dream. Louis Vuitton sales are plummeting, and magnums of Dom Pérignon are no longer being uncorked at a furious pace. That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards…"

[See also Stateside: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/adam-davidson-craft-business.html ]

"Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, & socialize—reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost.

Phil thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. I agree. Every education would be ad hoc. It would be student-directed toward the job market she’s aiming for.

This trend toward…coffeeshopification…is changing more than just colleges:

Book Stores Will Shrink to Coffee Shops…

The Coffee Shop Will Displace Most Retail Shops…

Offices Become Coffee Shops…Again…

What Doesn’t Become a Coffee Shop?…

…houses of worship…

What will remain other than coffee shops? Upscale retail will remain…[for] experience…Restaurants remain. Grocery stores remain.

Brick and mortar retail stores will be converted to public spaces. Multi-use space will be in increasing demand as connectivity tools allow easy coordination of impromptu events…"

"Learn how to make Vietnam's signature caffeinated treat in just under three minutes, with this charming "video recipe" from documentary filmmaker Eric Slatkin."

"While watching his wife do laundry, Alfonso Bialetti observed the workings of their primitive washing machine: a fire, a bucket, and a lid with a tube coming out of it. The bucket was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vaporized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laundry. Bialetti imagined a similar mechanism for coffee, one in which a lower chamber filled with boiling water would force steam up through coffee grounds and then condense in an upper chamber. Many prototypes later, the Moka Express was born."

"Final thought. When you go to Tim Wendelboe in Oslo, order a sort kaffe, black coffee, grab a seat, let it cool. This could be the cup of coffee that changes your understanding of coffee.<br />
<br />
There are four or more kinds of beans on the menu, so the play is to ask the person behind the bar for what is brewing best. This is a Tekangu from Kenya, AeroPressed by Ida. It was like drinking fresh juice made with Seville and Valenica oranges, clean and sweet and bright.<br />
<br />
It stays with you."

"However, my ultimate coffee shop, my most favorite out of the 3489320842 shops I’ve tried in my life, has been 49th Parallel in Vancouver for a while now. That was until this past Saturday when 49th Parallel was dethroned as being my ultimate most favorite shop ever. That title now belongs to La Stazione Café, located in Tijuana, Mexico."

"When it comes to coffeemakers, there's a low-tech counterpart to every high-tech solution."

"One of the most important coffee markets in the world, Japan imports more than 930 million pounds of it each year — more than France, less than Italy. It’s not a fad. There are coffee shops in Japan that date to at least the 1940s and traditions that reach back even further; it’s a culture that prizes brewed coffee over espresso (although that’s changing) and clarity over body. Coffee is as Japanese as baseball and beer.<br />
<br />
Until just a few years ago, much of the coffee gear that made it to the United States from Japan was brought here in suitcases. It wasn’t contraband, just obscure, a trickle of kettles and cones picked up by coffee obsessives or their well-traveled friends who didn’t mind lugging the extra bulk."

"I’ve lived in San Francisco for 15 years, which is 15 years more than anyone connected to this ad [in support of Proposition 8]. San Francisco changed my life. I found a career here. I was married here. I bought property here. I’m never, ever leaving. So I think I can speak to what San Francisco Values really are. Here are a few of them. [Bulleted list here]…

I believe San Franciscans embody the best American values: bravery, liberty, tolerance, and opportunity. I look around San Francisco and I see people who risked everything to move to a place where they could be free. People who decided, out a mix of idealism and insanity, that they could make a more perfect union that values life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

San Francisco values and American values are one and the same."

"More than any other drug, caffeine makes the modern world go ’round. But how good is it for you, how well does it work, and how much do most users consume? the answers may surprise you.…<br />
<br />
Consuming as little as a cup a day of coffee can make you dependent on coffee, which means when you stop drinking it, you’ll experience withdrawal symptoms like headaches, irritability, and drowsiness. In other words, you’ll be just like me, before my first cup of coffee in the morning.…<br />
<br />
So if coffee works at all to improve alertness, the 2004 study mentioned by Chatham offers the best advice: If you’re trying to stay alert on a long road trip, regardless of whether you’ve got a styrofoam cup of watered-down joe from a gas station or a double-walled thermos filled with Starbucks rocket fuel, you should sip slowly rather than chug the whole thing!"

"Arno Holschuh, barista at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, discusses the big and the little: the surface area of the bean, the thousand small cuts that will kill your espresso, and why Starbucks is not so bad. Video by CHOW.com" [via: http://brendandawes.posterous.com/obsessing-about-the-detail]

"Say you order a Venti “Caramel Brulee Creme” with nonfat milk? That’s 480 calories, 70 of which are fat. Or how about a Venti “Double Chocolaty Chip Frappucino Blended Creme” with whipped creme? Friend, you just inhaled a whopping 670 calories, 200 of which were pure fat.

"Like much of this literature, there is a confessional quality. We know we should not feel good about our participation in this system, but it is just so much fun. It is as if we who study the topic are involved in a process of self-criticism. This trend makes these books readable, perhaps, but it often dilutes their analytical force. Yet we still know too little about the middle class; with a defined working-class studies and history literature, we know far more about those lower on America’s economic ladder. Is the middle class too big and mystical to fully know? Or is it that most of the authors who write about the middle class are middle-class themselves, and thus uncomfortable with the self-reflection so necessary for thorough criticism?"

"There have been many fads in the American diet over the past decade: slow-food, low carb and locavorism. But what have Americans really been putting on their plates? Harry Balzer of the NPD, a consumer market research firm, says the aughts were the decade of yogurt."

"café doesn't get to start serving until 10, after everyone is working...[because] at 9 am people would grab one & scurry off to work. Now, they have to consciously come out of offices, invariably get stuck in line, where they start to mingle.:

"Soon, thanks to Apple's deal with Starbucks for free access to WiFi at their stores, ordering overpriced coffee will be easier than ever." not a Starbucks or coffee shop fan, but here's an interesting use of the iPhone

"Side-by-side diagrams of a few common espresso drinks....I’ve created a few small illustrations to help myself and others wrap their head around some of the small differences."

"some of the history behind the development of the Australasian market and compare it to that of the US"

"Co-working facilities blend the appeal of an independent environment with many of the advantages of the traditional office"

"New 'bedouins' transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office"