Coffee and Tea Zone (Colorado Springs, CO)
Coffee & Tea Zone
(719) 632-3887
25 N Tejon St # 101, Colorado Springs, CO 80903
A quaint little hole in the wall coffee shop with full coffee, tea, and espresso bar, as well as bubble tea. Friendly staff and free wireless. One computer terminal with affordable prices if you’re laptop-less. Rating 4 stars out of 5.
Roasting Coffee in a Barn
When Mark and Lisa Verrochi lost their “three Boston coffee stand leases to large corporate landlords,” they decided to start over — in a small, red, rent-free barn in their back yard.
Out of that barn in Hopkinton, Mass., Red Barn Coffee Roasters was born.
The company soon grew to include 7 locations.
It’s still in the process of expansion, but faces stiff competition:
Red Barn sits in a state flooded with chain coffee stores. Dunkin’ Donuts has 900 stand-alone Massachusetts stores along with 83 combination Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins outlets, while Starbucks has 151 stores and Honey Dew Donuts has 110 locations.
To help this local business stay afloat, visit one of Red Barn’s Cafes in Westboro, Southboro, Hopkinton, Milford or Boston.
Source: Milford Daily News
The Cultural Impact of Starbucks
Bryant Simon, professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, is “searching for the meaning of modern life amid the round tables and comfy sofas of Starbucks coffee shops.”
He has observed out 300 Starbucks locations in 6 countries, trying to learn “what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization.” In 2008, expect to see Simon’s “caffeine-fueled opus,” Consuming Starbucks, on the shelf at your local bookstore.
In a similar vein, Jonathan Morris, a British historian, says that “there’s a deep sense of unpredictability in the modern world, and what Starbucks provides a lot of people is predictability.” He believes that Starbucks is successful because it sells comfort in “an anonymous, often dislocating world.”
…Very deep stuff, eh? 
Source: USA Today
Celebrity Coffee Is Not For Me
Kopi Luwak is a very expensive coffee bean, mostly drunk by the rich and famous because of it’s hefty price. A pound of these beans can run you $300 or more but it is supposed to make one of the best tasting coffees in the world.
The secret to the beans is a marsupial in Indonesia called the Luwak. They scramble around looking for ripe coffee cherries to eat and once these beans move through their digestive track and out their bodies, they are harvested from the Luwak’s feces. They are “cleaned”, roasted and then sold to the suckers willing to pay that much for coffee out of an animals nether region.
Kopi Luwak
I’m not an adventurous eater at all and this item will definitely not be on my list of things to try. Customers have called the taste earthy, musty and exotic. Two of those terms are ironic, considering where the beans came from.
Aurafice (Seattle, WA)
Aurafice
Aurafice Internet and Coffee Bar
616 East Pine Street, Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA 98122. Ph: 206.860.9977. email: info@aurafice.com. http://www.aurafice.com/.
A hole in the wall coffee joint and cyber cafe with good teas and coffee, mostly good music, and a great alternative ambience. A social network pipeline for some of Seattle’s alternative crowd. Some presentation of local artist’s works. Rating: 4 stars out of 5.
Definition of Coffee Success
How do you define success if you run a coffee house? Is it by the number of customers, good press or like Starbucks the ability to charge people crazy prices and watch them pay even while they grumble?
Coffee makes me sick as in I’ll run the other way if you come towards me with a cup of the stuff. I don’t know if that’s the reason I cannot ever imagine shelling out $ 4 or $5 for a cup of something that I can make in my own house. I mean if you saved up all the money your spending on expensive coffee, couldn’t you then have enough to buy a good or even great espresso or coffee machine for some great homemade caffeine?
World Coffee (Dusseldorf, Germany)
World Coffee
Friedrichstrasse 34, 40217 Dusseldorf, Germany
Tele 0211-99 43 408. www.worldcoffee.de.
A quaint chain coffee shop that reminded me of a combination between a Starbucks and a Blenz. Friendly staff, decent prices, good seating. Chai i ordered was ok, tasted like loose leaf. Visited on 3/22/06. 3 stars out of 5.
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