Mike Wayne

Let’s settle something right now: San Diego is not just a beach town that happens to drink coffee. It’s a real, card-carrying coffee city — the kind where the person pulling your shot can tell you the farm, the elevation, …

Let’s settle something right now: Jacksonville is a coffee town, and it has been long before anybody slapped “third wave” on a menu. This is a city that sprawls — beach to Riverside, Springfield to Baymeadows — and somehow each …

Let’s settle something right now: Chicago is not a coffee afterthought. This is the city that gave the country its first serious direct-trade roaster, the city where a chef in a garage with a popcorn popper turned roasting into a …

Let’s settle something right out of the gate: Portland didn’t stumble into great coffee. This city built it, bean by stubborn bean, back when the rest of the country still thought “dark roast” was a personality. Rain nine months of …

Let’s settle something right now: Los Angeles is a coffee town. Not a “we have a few decent spots” town — a sprawling, sun-drunk, traffic-cursed, gloriously serious coffee town that quietly turns out some of the best roasters in the …

Let’s settle something. Seattle didn’t just stumble into coffee greatness — this city invented the modern coffee obsession, then quietly got bored of the chain on every corner and went and built something better. While the rest of the country …