Coffee tourism – some ideas!
Summer may be drawing to close, but it is never too early to start planning your next trip away.
As a reader of this blog, the chances are high that you are a seriously coffee freak and so these suggestions will undoubtedly tickle your taste buds and inject a serious case of wanderlust into your central nervous system.
So without further ado here are four coffee cities that any coffee tourist simply has to visit:
Seattle, WA, USA
The Pacific coast city is an obvious one, given its rather overt links to the globalisation of the coffee culture and third-space coffee shops. But there’s so much more to Seattle than giant chains and green mermaids; there are industrial, minimal and arty coffeehouses as well as some of the most cutting-edge baristas in the industry. However you like your coffee, somewhere in Seattle will probably be serving it.
Rome, Italy
If Seattle is the ‘new’ home of coffee then Rome is its traditional heartland. Packed with cafes, everybody knows their stuff when it comes to the bean and wherever you turn you’ll see people quickly downing espressos before carrying on with their daily lives.
Melbourne, Australia
So we’ve had the old and the new, but what about the future? Melbourne’s coffee scene is thriving at the moment and it is only going to get bigger and better in the coming years. The Australian city is seriously cutting edge and brilliantly divided: each area has its own unique culture, meaning you can hop across the city and discover numerous different approaches to brewing.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Any list would not be complete without coffee’s “birthplace”. As you are probably well aware, the story goes that in the 9th Century an Ethiopian goatherder called Kaldi stumbled across coffee and instantaneously popularised the drink. Whilst probably a myth, Ethiopia is intertwined with coffee’s story – no place more so than its capital, Addis Ababa.