How to Find a Coffee Shop Worth Going Back To

Most people find a good coffee shop the way they find a good anything: by accident, and then they wonder why they hadn't found it sooner.

The accidental discovery is fine. There's something about the unexpected cup that makes it better. But if you move to a city, or you're traveling, or you've been going to the same convenient place out of habit, there's a more deliberate version of this.

Start with people, not platforms. Generic maps give you proximity and aggregate ratings. Neither is what you want. A 4.2 with 800 reviews is probably a fine place that a lot of people passed through. What you want is the 4.8 with forty reviews, all of which read like they were written by someone who's been going regularly and has noticed something specific. Those are the places.

Look for a short menu. A coffee shop confident in what it makes doesn't need to offer everything. Three espresso drinks, a pour-over option, maybe a filter. If the menu is long enough that they had to laminate it in sections, that's information.

Check if they list where the coffee is from. This isn't foolproof, but a shop that mentions the farm or the region is a shop that thought about the beans. A shop that says "premium blend" is a shop that didn't.

Go in person before you decide. Walk past, look through the window. Is there anyone sitting there who looks like they planned to be there, rather than grabbed the nearest chair? That's a regulars question, and regulars are almost always right.

The harder thing, the thing most people can't do, is knowing which city blocks and neighbourhoods to check before you've already spent a week walking past the wrong places. That's the actual problem. Not whether you can recognize a good shop when you're in one, but how you find it at all.

That's what Brew Routes is for. [Browse the city guides](/shops) and you'll usually find what you're looking for before you land.