You think there's only Starbucks in America? Go to Los Angeles, and this coffee is worth drinking!

What's your daily life like?

Struggling to get up, brush your teeth and wash your face, eat breakfast.

Go out to take the subway, cross the road, enter the office building, say hello to admired colleagues, wait in line for the elevator. ..

Conference rooms, thinking about meeting agenda, discussing disputes, taking notes and sending emails.

For many people, the word "coffee" should be added to it.

The United States, as the largest coffee consumer in the world, "coffee" is simply a necessity in daily life. The average American drinks 250-300 cups of coffee a year, many workaholics, and coffee 24 hours a day.

Americans are used to a fast-paced life, which can be learned a little from American fast food culture. When it comes to coffee, it is often an American drip filter, soaking a large pot, cup after cup from morning till night. Because more water is added and less coffee powder is added, the taste is particularly light. Once upon a time in the United States, there was no concept of fine coffee, so coffee was usually bitter and tasteless, and you had to add a lot of sugar and milk to drink it. .. This kind of coffee is jokingly called "sock juice" by Europeans.

With the passage of time and the improvement of taste, lightly baked cafes with an emphasis on local style continue to emerge in the United States. An American who is used to drinking sock juice has become a world leader in the famous third wave of boutique coffee.

The third wave of boutique coffee is well known, but there is not much perceptual understanding. In the final analysis, to understand what is good about American coffee, you still have to taste it!

Mr. Cha went to Los Angeles, an important coffee town on the West Coast.

Drink 40 cafes in 4 days.

There are 14, reliable, comfortable and worth drinking.

There are award-winning front-line cafes

There is also a shop where you can't see the coffee machine on the table.

Most important of all,

Teacher Cha also met his own male god!

The other party is also called Charles~.

Finally, there is also the observation and summary of Mr. Cha's trip to the United States.

Interlock boutique

1 | Portola Coffee Lab

3313 Hyland Ave, Suite B2 Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Technically, Portola is not in Los Angeles, but in Orange County on the edge of Los Angeles (well, where the rich live). It has six stores, all in Orange County, using its own baked beans.

When I arrived at the SoCo mall, there were already people waiting in line for coffee (where did these people come from at 10 o'clock on a weekday morning? .. )

In the corner of the store, there was a moustache cleaning the roaster. I was surprised by the degree of care. After I left nearly an hour after my arrival, the roaster was cleaned up and was lit to warm up.

I think it is with such a degree of care that they have won the honor of Micro Roaster of the year selected by Roast Magazine magazine in 2015!

Is the coffee good? The answer, of course, is: delicious! Shallow roasting, with local water and extraction methods, makes the coffee has a high acidity, but the sweetness and balance are still very good!

Portola has its own unique way to promote boutique coffee. On the edge of the flagship store, there is a cafe called Theorem, which has only six seats and focuses on slow living and allows customers to taste boutique coffee in the form of cocktails!

Most want to move to Shanghai!

2 | Bar Nine

3515 Helms Ave 、 Culver City

All in all, this trip is a favorite cafe!

Located in the secluded community of Culver City, only a "9" is written at the door of the cafe, and the boss is too low-key!

As soon as you enter the door, the huge factory building is fully six or seven meters high, with simple but full of design furniture, the environment is comfortable, it makes people feel that it is enough to come to this cafe today!

When I want to order, I find that where is the coffee machine? There is no coffee maker on the table!

It turned out that Bar Nine was the first coffee shop in the United States to use ModBar. ModBar hid all the components of the coffee machine under the table, leaving only the brewing head and steam bar of the coffee, in order to bridge the gap between baristas and customers and better communicate, which is similar to the Black Hawk coffee machine.

I ordered a Kenyan concentrate and a cappuccino. Espressp is a little bitter and salty, but Cabo drinks well. After asking for my advice, the barista immediately made a concentrated cup, and this one is much better! When he was about to leave, he refused to take money. I said no. After all, he ended up with a good drink. But he says you can't give customers a bad experience.

If domestic baristas can have such self-consciousness, the coffee industry will certainly develop by leaps and bounds!

A great store always gathers customers with the same temperament. The housekeeper and I often sighed that if only there were more such shops in Shanghai. ..

My male god! Charles Barbinsky

3 | Go get em tiger

230 N Larchmont Blvd 、 Los Angeles

The first time I knew Charles (it wasn't me, and I wasn't called Charles because of him, but maybe it was fate), I watched the video of his 2009 American barista competition. The whole process is very relaxed, like naturally chatting with friends and performing naturally. Since then, changed my consistent perception of the game, the original does not necessarily need to send a serious message.

It wasn't until 2012 or 13, when he left Intelligentsia and opened Go get them tiger, that the store was in my to do list. Finally, I had a chance to visit.

Go get them tiger is located on the edge of Beverly Avenue with beautiful scenery and shady trees. The small shop is crowded with people inside and outside. Coffee beans from famous roasters in the United States and Canada are used in the store. Is the coffee good? Because it is an idol, it tastes good anyway. (the behavior of brain-handicapped fans is all present.)

4 | G & B

C19 、 324 S Hill St 、 Los Angeles

Another new store, G & B, is located in Grand Central Market. Use EK43 Italian bean grinder.

To my surprise, the barista will weigh the coffee beans and coffee powder cup by cup, and then make a concentrate. The degree of nitpicking on quality control is the busiest coffee shop I have ever seen! And the speed is so fast that it can cope with the flow of people waiting in line!

After drinking coffee, there are all kinds of delicacies in Grand Central Market, which can solve all the eating and drinking needs at once.

It's not just coffee, the food is also very painstaking.

5 | Superba food & bread

1900 S. Lincoln Blvd, Venice

For Superba, I was surprised by its delicious coffee, bread and brunch! It is a coffee shop with both coffee and food quality.

Although the coffee is not amazing, the bread and food are impressive!

In Los Angeles with beautiful scenery, blue sky and white clouds, and Superba is also located in Venice (seaside, there are beauties!) Coupled with the unique decoration, it naturally attracted a lot of good-looking guests. But the boss of Superba knows very well that appearance alone does not have core competitiveness, and he has made great efforts on food.

6 | Paper or Plastik Caf é

5772 West Pico Boulevard 、 Los Angeles

Paper or Plastik Caf é, compared with Superba, takes a family-style decoration route, with medium-level coffee, but with breakfast, it is very comfortable, slightly sour, not bitter, sweet and mellow, and less than three US dollars, the price-to-performance ratio is excellent.

A delicious self-baking shop in an affluent area

It is also crowded on rainy days.

7 | Copa Vida

2680 Nina St 、 Pasadena

The delicious self-baking shop in the affluent area! There is Blue Bottle nearby, but it doesn't affect business at all. It was raining heavily that day, and the queue still spread all the way to the door, and the shop was full.

Drink cappuccino and hand Yega Chuefei: Cabo is the best drink on this trip, the sweet milk, super dense taste, not bitter at all, after the rhyme brings a little bit of acid, adding a lot of layers!

Its coffee is divided into three series: go, enjoy and experience. I drank experience Yega, which is very typical. Although it is made with an American drip filter, it can still show the coffee bean itself and the intention of baking. The aroma of citrus flowers and the tail rhyme with chocolate make it very sour and sweet.

The feeling of the whole store and the kindness of the barista are also very comfortable!

☕ other cafes you can go to list

8 | Primo Passo coffee Co.

Frigid wind benchmark shop!

702 Montana Ave 、 Santa Monica, CA 90403

9 | Lo/Cal coffee and market

Warm and comfortable

2214 Pico Blvd 、 Santa Monica

10 | Espresso Cielo

Barista is beautiful and has a good personality.

3101 Main St 、 Santa Monica

11 | Cognoscenti Coffee

Small and delicate

6114 Washington Blvd 、 Culver City

12 | Dinosaur Coffee

Smallpox of dinosaur skeleton and coffee cup of Japanese designer

Mix and create a special space!

4334 Sunset Blvd 、 Los Angeles

13 | Verve coffee

Another boutique coffee chain brand, quality control is very good!

833 S Spring St 、 Los Angeles

14 | Daily Dose Caf é

comfortable! comfortable! comfortable!

1820 Industrial St 、 Los Angeles

15 | Blue Bottle coffee

Recognize this family, other families do not guarantee …...

582 Mateo St 、 Los Angeles

40, nearly 100 cups of coffee, on the whole, the development of the US coffee industry is polarized: one end is a deep baking route, like Starbucks, and the other end is more and more shallow, trying to express "native flavor".

Deep baking is like a burden. There are people who have been accustomed to this flavor and things that can't be shaken off by decades-old cafes. Suitable for adding milk and sugar to balance bitterness.

And shallow baking, there are many cafes overkill, too shallow baking, too much emphasis on fruit acid, fruit acid is simply equated with the flavor of the place of origin, but this is often not fully developed, let alone suitable for drinking all the time.

I am a person who drinks sour coffee, but I still can't bear more than ten cups a day. Instead, it's a little deeper (full baking, but no deep baking bitterness, coke, smoke), which makes the balance between sweet and sour better and allows me to drink all the time.

Most of the shops selected this time are well balanced. As for those who lose the election, they either pursue shallow baking too much, or the skills and services of baristas are not satisfactory enough. In short, there are more or less problems in production. Guys, go to Los Angeles, keep an eye on it!

Text and Picture | Charles