# 1, Gimme! Coffee, New York

The upstate New York coffee roaster turned New York-centric chain of independent shops was making “Third Wave” coffee before it was even a thing. Consider what Ben Phelan wrote in GQ back in 2007, when Gimme was just seven years old, had opened its Williamsburg location four years earlier (you know, before Williamsburg was a hot spot for coffee), and was currently shopping for its Manhattan location: “… A new wave of coffee shops — like Brooklyn’s Gimme [and peers around the country] — have a radical idea about coffee: that it can be elevated above mere drinkability and can be a culinary product equal to single-malt Scotch.” Since then, Gimme has transformed into the godfather of craft coffee, paving the way for today’s flashier coffee chains like Blue Bottle. Thanks to carefully sourced, “farm to cup” beans, artisanal roasting (they were recently named Roaster of the Year by Roast magazine), and its homegrown roots, Gimme is quite often the standard that coffee shops and up-and-coming chains hope to achieve. Not to mention a crop of baristas that are hard to find in today’s day and age. Wrote one barista on the company blog as a sort of “in defense” of the profession, “As a Barista, I have a lot of priorities that I’m juggling at any given time — coffee information, flavor notes, side work, how many trips downstairs I have to make with crates of milk — but if I’m doing my job right, the top of that list should be the person standing across the counter from me. Even if he or she chooses to ignore me. Even if he’s on his phone or she’s wearing sunglasses. Even if he orders a caramel macchiato or a dry cappuccino or an espresso to go. I don’t care. I still love them. And I’ll still make them the best coffee I can because there are no rules for me when it comes to customers.”

# 2:Barista, Portland, Ore.

After seeing Portlandia’s “barista manifesto” sketch, it’s easy to assume that coffee shops in Portland, Ore., are well, out there. But a look just one of the coffee shops in Portland shows that there’s substance behind the title of America’s coffee capital. What Barista does particularly well is showcase the best roasters of the Northwest in a “multi-roaster” model with a rotating list of roasts that range from hyper-local roasters (like Seattle’s Kuma) to Stumptown. It’s just part of Billy Wilson’s, barista champion and owner of Barista’s three locations, perspective on coffee culture as a whole. It’s much bigger than just one shop or one roaster — “I see this new coffee movement as something that goes straight back to farms and villages in the Third World,” he said to the Willamette Week. “It can literally change the lives of whole families. So I want to do it well.”

# 3:Courier Coffee Roasters, Portland, Ore.

Courier Coffee Roasters may have paved the way for Barista, Stumptown, and other Portland-area coffee shops as one of the most independent, “low-fi” coffee shops around. Known for its hand-roasted, small-batch coffees, Courier Coffee originally started as a bike-delivery roasting company. You can still get your coffee delivered by bike, but the brick-and-mortar shop is at heart a local coffee shop — with a vinyl collection, hip-hop turntable, freshly baked muesli and baked goods, pour-over coffee dripped into Mason jars, and not much else. The shop takes into consideration the bean from start to finish, only roasting, grinding, and brewing the amount the baristas think they’ll serve per day — quite literally the freshest cup of coffee you’ll get in PDX. The shop even uses KF-4 23K Swissgold paper filters for a taste that’s as clean as a French press. It’s the kind of coffee shop that revels in its simplicity — and keeps customers coming back for more.

# 4: Café Grumpy, New York City

Café Grumpy may be now best known as Ray and Hannah’s coffee shop on Girls to those outside of New York City, but New Yorkers know it as the coffee shop to go to. What sets Café Grumpy apart in a sea of coffee shops in the Big Apple is its own roasted coffee. Co-founder Caroline Bell told Food GPS in an interview that they started roasting their beans in 2009 in order to take coffee into their own hands and now, the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, company produces seven different roasts from Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, and others. It’s what turns a long list of coffee drinks into something beyond an ordinary cup of joe. But Café Grumpy is most loved by coffee lovers for its dedication to maintaining a true coffeehouse vibe at its four New York City locations. Gone are the laptop drones hooked up to an endless stream of Wi-Fi — it’s one of the few shops without Internet. Instead, what you get is a relaxed atmosphere with real conversations hanging in the air. Said Bell to The New York Times back in 2010, “I appreciate the idea of when you go someplace and it feels like a home away from home, but I don’t think it should be a home office away from home.” (Now, if only coffee shops could ban smartphones.)

# 5:Lamill Coffee Boutique, Los Angeles

Compared to the other coffee shops on the list, Lamill isn’t going to have the comfy, cozy vibe you’d expect to find in a coffee shop. But there’s a reason why it’s called a “boutique” and not house or shop — Lamill translates the coffeehouse cup of joe into a chic, modern take. Consider Lamill the white-tablecloth restaurant of coffee shops, says owner Craig Min: “Most beverage places today have instant, industrial ways of making their drinks and use mass-produced syrups and powders,” he says. “… We’re sourcing the highest-quality, fresh ingredients to make the syrups, extracts, and consommés that go into our beverages.” How is Lamill changing the game? Allowing customers to pick their “extraction” (Clover, Chemex, Eva Solo, French press, hand-drip iced coffee, Japanese hand-drip, or siphon brew) and their coffee bean, or from a long list of espresso drinks. Lamill brings a new level of sophistication and polish to your cup of coffee (and tea, too).

# 6:Stumptown, Various Locations

Throw Stumptown into the great coffee debate, and you’ll get a variety of opinions. Some love it, some hate it. Some say it doesn’t deserve to be called a great coffee shop, that it’s gone corporate. Yet our panelists ranked Stumptown higher than the majority of coffee shops and above the six nominated coffee chains for its quality of coffee, atmosphere, and customer service. No doubt that Stumptown was the game-changer in the field of coffee; what Starbucks is to Seattle, Stumptown is to Portland. Portland Food and Drink put it best: “Love ‘em or loathe them, Stumptown has given Portland a reputation as a serious coffee city, and has turned the industry upside down by cultivating consumers to demand higher quality, and to push cafés into being willing to provide it. Stumptown realized early on that great beans were nothing if the beverages made from them were poorly executed. They have insisted on intense — some might say rigid — training, equipment programs and wholesale buying requirements.” Slowly but surely, Stumptown is bringing its quality roasts from coast to coast; after a successful opening of a roaster in Red Hook, N.Y., and two Manhattan locations (one of which soon to open in Chelsea), the summer of 2012 brought new reports of a Los Angeles Stumptown.

#7： Ritual Coffee Roasters, San Francisco

There is no shortage of good coffee in San Francisco — but based on our panelists’ votes, Ritual Coffee Roasters blew the competition out of the water. What did it? The nearly perfect scores for its coffee and single-origin espresso, sourced from Central America, South America, and Africa and brewed in Japanese V60 cone brewers. At the shop on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and its accompanying locations (a coffee bar in the Bayview neighborhood, a shipping container at Proxy in Hayes Valley, and in the Oxbow Market in Napa), it’s just coffee, pure and simple. It’s no wonder the Valencia flagship attracts a wide range of residents, from yuppies to coffee geeks, which may explain the high score for atmosphere. In a city that’s buzzing with caffeine, Ritual will continue to hold its spot as the best.