Editorial guides

Editorial guides to specialty coffee and curated bars worldwide.

• Tokyo's best-looking rooms usually have the coffee to match. A few really don't.
  Deep Dive · 4 min read

  We score the room and the cup as separate things, so we can check whether one predicts the other. Across 153 Tokyo venues it barely does, which makes the handful of dramatic misses worth knowing by name.

• Tokyo's matcha moved into the coffee shops
  Trend · 4 min read

  Not one of the matcha specialists we have reviewed in Tokyo is a tea house. They are coffee bars, a converted bathhouse, a guitar brand's cafe, and now a shisha bar.

• Where to work in Tokyo: the one cafe in four that actually lets you
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  More than half the cafes we have reviewed in Tokyo have no wifi. Three in five would rather you did not open a laptop. About one in four clears both.

• Every venue we've reviewed in Oslo is a Steep Pick. That has never happened anywhere else.
  City Guide · 3 min read

  Three specialty venues reviewed in Oslo. All three are Steep Picks, and all three are run by people with an actual world championship behind them. Here is a city where the middle tier never got a chance to exist.

• How to read a coffee bag
  Deep Dive · 4 min read

  Four fields on every bag tell you almost everything about what's in the cup: roast date, origin, processing, and roast level. Here's what each one actually means, and how to read a shelf of bags in under a minute.

• Bangkok's roasteries are building something the rest of Asia isn't.
  Trend · 5 min read

  In under a decade, Bangkok built a microroastery scene with world-competition credentials and a globally-ranked specialty cafe. It didn't need to be this good this fast.

• Best 5 cafes to sit, sip, and linger in Tokyo
  List · 4 min read

  Not every cafe in this city invites you to stay. These five do.

• Nobody flew to Madrid for the coffee. That is changing.
  City Guide · 5 min read

  Spain has one of the most embedded cafe cultures in the world, which made specialty coffee harder to introduce, and then made it more interesting to watch. Here is where the best of it is now.

• The fourth wave of coffee is not about the coffee
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  Third wave built the best craft the industry had ever seen. It also built rooms that felt cold. The next shift is not technical. It is human.

• Third wave coffee had four birthplaces.
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  Four cities, one term coined in San Francisco from observations of Norwegian barista culture, and a coffee scene in Melbourne that nobody was watching. The origin story is messier than anyone admits.

• The cafes in Porto and Lisbon blurring the line between espresso bar and wine bar
  Trend · 3 min read

  A generation of specialty roasters arrived with a different idea about what a day could look like. The natural wine crowd had the same idea from the other direction. They found each other.

• The 9 Best Cafes for Solo Work in Lisbon
  List · 3 min read

  By someone who took the research seriously. Verified addresses, confirmed WiFi, and one honest qualifier at the end.

• Why Tokyo's kissaten culture is the world's most quietly radical cafe movement
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  The old-school coffee shops that refused to modernise are now more radical than anything the third wave ever attempted.

• Bangkok's Ari neighborhood is a one-hour specialty coffee education
  City Guide · 4 min read

  From the roaster that rewrote the Thai origin story to a coffee stand inside a weekend market, Ari gives you the full picture in under an hour.

• Seoul vs Melbourne: which city has the more interesting specialty scene right now?
  Comparison · 4 min read

  Melbourne still wins the argument on the average cup. But interesting is a different question from better, and the answer is less obvious than it used to be.

• The Tokyo cocktail bar that built a concept, and why it matters
  Trend · 4 min read

  A new generation of Tokyo bars built their rooms around a governing idea rather than a drinks list. The altitude, the cacao, the sound system, the season. The concept is not the backdrop. It is the reason the room exists.