Why This Guide Exists

I'm Italian, so coffee was never really a discovery. It was inherited, argued about, and not up for debate before nine in the morning.

At some point that inherited habit turned into something closer to an obsession, and not just for what ended up in the cup. I got curious about coffee at 360 degrees: the history behind it, the farmers behind each harvest, the process and climate conditions that shape a bean long before it ever meets a roaster, and how it eventually lands on a shelf a continent away. I spent just as much time on the other side of the counter, listening to baristas talk through the small, hard-won details of what actually makes a cappuccino or an espresso worth drinking. Eventually I got a CSP Barista Skills certification from the Specialty Coffee Association, mostly to find out whether I actually knew what I was talking about, and that's when the hunt started for real.

What changed, over the years, was where I was doing all of it. For most of my career as a tech executive I was on a plane more often than not. Dozens of cities a year, most of them for a day or two, each one demanding the same small ritual before the first meeting: find something worth drinking.

That should have been simple. It rarely was. This was before Google Maps even existed or could be trusted to know what a good coffee shop even was, so finding one meant assembling scraps: an old guidebook, a blog post two years out of date, a recommendation texted by whoever I knew in that city, if I was lucky enough to know anyone. Some of it held up. Most of it didn't: not specific enough, not current enough, not written by anyone who'd actually go there themselves.

At some point I stopped waiting for that guide to exist and built it instead.

Caffeine Hunter is that guide, kept honest by one rule: nearly every shop in it has been visited, by me, or by someone in a trusted network of fellow coffee hunters whose standards I'd bet on in a city I've never set foot in. Not aggregated reviews, not scraped ratings. Just the specialty coffee worth finding, city by city, mapped the way I wished someone had already done for me.

This guide is never finished. More cities and more shops will keep getting added as the hunt continues, and if you have a suggestion for where to go next, or a favorite spot of your own worth including, tell us about it.

Stefano