Reminder: you need good people behind the bar
This is a gentle reminder to local coffee shop owners: unless you like losing business, do not hire teenagers to pull shots without adequate training. I’m not going to name the shop, but let’s say that they appeared with a fairly glowing review sometime within the last 10 or 15 posts on this blog. Over the weekend we got two different coffees from the same under-trained teenager and both were godawfully horrible. So horrible I didn’t take another sip after my first and went to another coffee shop to replace my awful coffee. I will absolutely go back to that shop, but I hope most owners don’t want to take the gamble that most customers will come back after bad coffee drinks.
Owners: train your people!! Pulling shots is an art. Yes, at times we’ve gone on and on about the different roasters in town, but we realize that personnel is probably more important than roast in the quality of the outcome. Don’t have rookies working alone behind your bar if you want to keep your customers coming back. They need to know about timing the shot, pulling thin, how to know in advance if it’s going to be a bad shot, etc. Every quality shop in the downtown core (Goat, Cup, Sidney’s, Amante) has baristas that know before the shot is done whether it’s going to be good or not, and will trash it immediately if it’s going to be bad. Hopefully that kind of attention to detail will spread.
Le Tour with le fans
So I’ve been looking forward to the Tour since last year’s superhuman (and potentially juiced up) feat of Floyd Landis. While I catch most of the stages at home in the evening, I thought it would be fun to see a few stages at the aforementioned shops showing the tour. Yeah, it was fun but with half a dozen guys there trying to talk about strategy, placing, riders, etc., etc., it kind of detracts from the overall excitement. This is going to sound really biker snotty, but instead of hearing intelligent insight, I hear name mix-ups (Condor instead of Contador, Rasputin rather than Rasmussen), ridiculous calls on who’s going to win (Vinokourov after he’s 35 minutes down?), and a general lack of understanding of what the hell it’s about. It’s like if I were to talk (and really loudly at that) about soccer to a group of soccer fans. I’m not knowledgeable on soccer, so why throw in my two cents? So gentlemen, give it a rest, let Phil and Paul do the commentating and simply enjoy the physical feat that is Le Tour ’07.
the list of shops we haven’t mentioned yet
[note: shops will be struck from this list as they are reviewed. New reviews appear above this post. If you're a reader of the blog and would like to review one of these shops shoot us an email.]
Amante (north Boulder)
Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop (15th and Pearl)
Bookends (on the Pearl St Mall at the Boulder Book Store)
Brewing Market (downtown/13th) (reviewed here)
Brewing Market (McGuckins on Folsom) (reviewed here)
Brewing Market (Baseline)
Buchanan’s (The Hill)
Cafe Play (The Hill)
Dish (Pearl between 19/20)
Dushanbe Tea House (farmer’s market/river)
Espresso Roma (The Hill)
Joe’s Espresso (Steelyards on 30th) (reviewed here)
Laughing Goat (Pearl & 17th)
Maxpresso (28th St) ?
Ozo Coffee Co. (reviewed here)
Paradise Bakery (Pearl St Mall)
Peaberry (Arapahoe & 27th) (reviewed here)
Spruce (north Boulder)
Spruce (Pearl & 8th)
Starbucks (take your pick of the 23)
Trident (Pearl & 11th)
Vic’s (30th St near Iris)
Walnut Cafe (30th/Walnut) ?
our new cards
One of us (me) made some cards (standard 2×3.5 bidness card size) to get the word out about this blogshiz. Click here and you get a two page pdf of front and back cards so you can print them out yo’own’self and do some distro.
Here’s the front: 
And here’s the back:
