Specialty coffee by country
7 countries mapped in enough depth to be worth a guide. Each one lists the cities we cover, the roasteries based there, and what the scene is actually like.
PolandcafésroasteriescitiesYou already know where to drink coffee in your own city; the harder question is what happens the moment you leave it. Poland's specialty map runs from the Baltic down to the Bieszczady, dense in four or five places and thin across dozens of small towns, and the thin parts are where a trip stops being predictable.CzechiacafésroasteriescitiesA Prague counter tends to show its hand: two grinders, a scale under the brewer, and a card with this week's filter written out by farm and process. What changes from door to door is whose name is on the bag — and once you leave the city, how far apart the doors are.ItalycafésroasteriescitiesAn espresso at the counter still costs about a euro here, drunk standing, finished in ninety seconds. Specialty coffee breaks that deal: it asks two or three times the price and asks you to sit down. What follows is where that trade is worth taking in Italy, and where the old bar still wins on its own terms.SlovakiacafésroasteriescitiesDiamonds Roastery works out of Dunajska Luzna, a village outside the capital that carries no cafe on this map at all. The pattern repeats across Slovakia: the roasters scatter into small towns, the cafes cluster hard. Bratislava does nearly all of the drinking, while much of the rest of the country reads as supply rather than scene.GermanycafésroasteriescityBerlin carries German coffee on this map almost single-handed. It is a flat, polycentric city where the roasters kept their own bars rather than handing the room to somebody else, and where two good cups often sit twenty minutes apart on the U-Bahn. Plan it by district and the day holds together.PortugalcafésroasteriescityA bica costs about seventy cents at a tiled counter, drunk standing, gone in under a minute. A filter coffee a few streets away costs several times that, and comes with a chair. Portugal's specialty scene lives in the distance between those two habits, and on this atlas that distance is measured entirely in Lisbon.NetherlandscafésroasteriescityRotterdam does not look like the rest of the Netherlands. Flattened in 1940 and rebuilt in concrete and glass, it took to new things faster than its neighbours, coffee included. The Dutch side of Specialty Atlas runs through this one city, which makes it the rare trip you can plan on foot in a single day.