Coffee Cities of the World: A Specialty Coffee Travel Guide

Twelve cities that recur in the story of modern specialty coffee, from Oslo and Melbourne to Tokyo and Seoul: what happened there, and roasters to look up, each checked on its own website.

By Jay Arr Updated

Some cities have shaped how specialty coffee is roasted, brewed and talked about well beyond their own cafés. This guide covers twelve of them. The list is editorial, not a ranking, and it leaves out cities whose coffee traditions are older and different in kind, such as Vienna, Trieste, Istanbul and Addis Ababa, because it follows the modern specialty story. That story is told in full in our history of third wave coffee.

How the roasters were chosen and checked. For each city we name one to three roasters that its history points to. Each one was checked on its own website on October 18, 2026, and the founding years are the ones those sites give. We haven’t visited these cafés for this guide, and naming one isn’t a claim that it’s the best in town.

Oslo

Oslo is where the term “third wave” got its first examples. Trish Rothgeb’s essay “Norway and Coffee,” printed in the Roasters Guild’s newsletter in spring 2003, opens at the November 2002 preliminaries of the Norwegian Barista Championship and features two Oslo baristas: Robert Thoresen, whom she describes as the first World Barista Champion, in 2000, and Tim Wendelboe, Norway’s reigning champion at the time.

Wendelboe’s own company history says he won the World Barista Championship in 2004 and the World Cup Tasters Championship in 2005, and opened his espresso bar on June 30, 2007, at Grünersgate 1 in the Grünerløkka district. The roastery moved a few blocks east in 2018; the bar stayed where it was. The company says it publishes what it pays for its coffee, and that since 2019 it has also farmed coffee itself, at Finca El Suelo in Huila, Colombia.

Roaster to look up: Tim Wendelboe (espresso bar, roastery and training center).

Copenhagen

Coffee Collective was founded in Copenhagen in 2007 by Peter Dupont, Casper Engel Rasmussen and Klaus Thomsen. Its website says the three still own it, and that after 17 years of being led by its founders, it brought in Rebecca Vang as chief executive; it describes Thomsen as a World Barista Champion. La Cabra says it was established in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2011.

Roasters to look up: Coffee Collective; La Cabra (founded in Aarhus).

Stockholm

Drop Coffee says it was founded in Stockholm in 2009 as a coffee bar near Mariatorget, started roasting a year later on a 1 kg roaster at the back of the shop, and moved its roastery to Rosersberg, just north of the city, in 2018. It says it opened a café in Nakano, Tokyo, on September 18, 2026.

Roaster to look up: Drop Coffee.

Berlin

The Barn says that since 2010 it has stood for “an uncompromising approach to quality, transparency, and craftsmanship,” and that it roasts lightly to preserve each lot’s identity.

Roaster to look up: The Barn.

London

Square Mile Coffee says it was founded in 2008 by Anette Moldvaer and James Hoffmann, and is now directed by Felicity Whitehead. Hoffmann went on to write The World Atlas of Coffee, one of the main sources across this site.

Roaster to look up: Square Mile Coffee (a roaster; its site lists cafés that serve its coffee).

Melbourne

Melbourne often comes up in the argument over who invented the flat white, but the best-documented claims are elsewhere: Alan Preston’s in Sydney in 1985, Fraser McInnes’s in Wellington in 1989 and Derek Townsend’s in Auckland in the 1980s. The historian Garritt Van Dyk judges Preston’s the strongest, as our flat white guide explains. The Melbourne roasters below date from the 2000s:

Roasters to look up:

Tokyo

Tokyo’s coffeehouse tradition is old. Mark Pendergrast writes in Uncommon Grounds that Tokyo’s first kissaten (coffeehouse) opened in 1888, that hundreds appeared in Japanese cities after 1950, when official coffee imports were allowed, and that by the mid-1970s Tokyo alone had 21,000. Newer specialty roasters work alongside that tradition.

Roasters to look up:

Seoul

Coffee Libre says it was founded in 2009 by Pil Hoon Seu, who has been introduced as Korea’s first Q Grader, and that it has traded directly with about 250 producing areas. Fritz Coffee Company’s website offers both coffee and bread. Anthracite says its Hapjeong shop is an old shoe factory reborn as a coffee factory.

Roasters to look up: Coffee Libre; Fritz Coffee Company; Anthracite.

Portland

Stumptown says it was founded in Portland in 1999, with its first café on Southeast Division Street in a former beauty parlor called Hair Bender. Its founder, Duane Sorenson, is one of the three buyers Michaele Weissman featured in her 2008 book God in a Cup, Pendergrast writes, alongside Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia in Chicago and Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture in Durham, North Carolina; Weissman called them “third wave” coffee people. Peet’s added Stumptown in 2015, Peet’s says. Our Stumptown vs Blue Bottle comparison covers who owns it now.

Roasters to look up:

Seattle

Starbucks opened in Seattle on March 30, 1971, Pendergrast writes, selling mainly whole beans. Howard Schultz, its head of marketing, came back from a trip to Milan in 1983 wanting to serve espresso drinks, and bought the company with his investors in 1987. Our Peet’s vs Starbucks comparison follows that story. Seattle’s espresso tradition is older than its third wave: Espresso Vivace says it was founded by David Schomer and Geneva Sullivan in 1988 and has roasted in the Northern Italian style since 1992.

Roaster to look up: Espresso Vivace.

San Francisco and the Bay Area

Of the American cities in this guide, the Bay Area’s specialty history goes back furthest. Alfred Peet opened Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Berkeley on April 1, 1966, and Pendergrast notes that Graffeo, Freed, Teller & Freed and Hardcastle’s came before him in San Francisco. Erna Knutsen, who worked at the San Francisco importer B. C. Ireland, used the words “specialty coffees” in a 1974 Tea & Coffee Trade Journal interview, by Pendergrast’s account. Rothgeb, who named the third wave, founded Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in the Bay Area in 2011.

Roasters to look up:

New York

Roasters to look up:

The third wave beyond America

An earlier version of this page said the third wave was “effectively American” when it was named in 2002. Rothgeb’s own essay was about Norwegian baristas, so the movement was never only American. Several of the roasters above now have cafés far from home: Drop Coffee in Tokyo, Stumptown in Kyoto, Blue Bottle across Asia.

Planning a coffee trip

When you’re back home, our V60 guide covers pour-over technique, and our grind size guide explains how fine to grind for each brewer.

Sources

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