Have you noticed? There’s a coffee revolution going on, and it’s worldwide. Oh, and it’s great: As people are looking towards more sophistication in the culinary space, Specialty Coffee is taking stage. In virtually every major city or even smaller town, new fresh specialty coffee places are popping up on a regular basis. Driven by young people with a creative and perfectionist mindset, these new coffee shops are becoming an oasis in every urban jungle. And this revolution is laying ground for the perfect travel hack: Traveling by Coffee. But let me explain.

In these recent years, I have found a new strategy to get to know a new city. Of course, you could go by the guidebook and tick off the sightseeing to-do list: This church, that old building, this museum. But I do it the other way: I find the best specialty coffee places in town with a bit of Google maps research, and then visit them one by one, mostly one to two per day, more than ever just by walking there.

I have found that a great specialty coffee place with gourmet coffee is usually an indicator for a cool environment – meaning that such stores usually appear in the hippest and upcoming neighborhoods of a city. But more and more, these neighborhoods are not inside your standard tourist area. They are where all the cool people live and work – and in many instances I would have never found them were it not by the coffee place I was looking for.

Now I can imagine that searching a city like Los Angeles for the best coffee places can be a daunting task – you can expect Google Maps to have hundreds, if not thousands of coffee shops in a city of this size. But if you drill it down to real top-notch gourmet specialty coffee, the selection becomes pretty thin. Here’s my process.

First, I do a quick Google Maps search in the neighborhood or area that I’m thinking about going. I look for the keywords “specialty coffee” or “coffee roasters”. Then I look at the ratings – anything below a 4.5 is usually garbage. Last, I scan the photos of the places that are still on the list and look at the equipment they use – specifically the coffee machine. Shops with a La Marzocco or Rocket coffee machine usually are a good indicator for quality coffee. Another indicator would be the design of the place – here it becomes more subjective but after a while you get a “feel” for spotting a great coffee place.

Here’s a list of some of the greatest specialty coffee places I discovered on my travels so far:

Americas:

Banner Coffee Company – Pismo Beach, California

Dark Horse Coffee Roasters – Kauai, Hawaii

The Curb Kaimuki – Honolulu, Hawaii

Echo Coffee – Phoenix, Arizona

Press Coffee – Scottsdale, Arizona

Vesta Coffee Roasters – Las Vegas, Nevada

787 Coffee – New York, New York

Europe:

Brutal Specialty Coffee – Madrid, Spain

HANS Coffee – Copenhagen, Denmark

NEYSE Coffee & Food – Vienna, Austria

Nomad Coffee Lab – Barcelona, Spain

Ozone Coffee – London, England

Skg Vinkafé – Bergen, Norway

Wandu – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Asia:

host x AMBER – Bangkok, Thailand

WWAPORTAL – Bangkok, Thailand