The final list

Tomorrow we begin the long trip back home to Canada. My sabbatical officially ended on June 30th, but we stayed here a few extra weeks so that the kids could wrap up a full school year.

I haven’t quite finished writing up the espressos that made up the Rocket Cup World Tour—I have about five more visits to describe, which should provide me with a healthy dose of nostalgia over the next little while. But I thought I should wrap up my time in London with a bit of shock and awe, by enumerating the espresso bars I’ve visited over the past year. The ground rules are simple: these are places where I’ve consumed an actual espresso drink, which breaks down in practice to approximately 85% double espressos and 15% flat whites. In many places I’ve had both, and there are very few in which I’ve had only a flat white. I’m separating the list into places within and outside of London. I’m also not including large chains—during the year I visited a few Costas and Neros (both huge chains in the UK), and even, on rare occasions, Starbucks.

Ready? Here we go.

Within London

1. Coffee Lounge (Woolwich)
2. Black Vanilla (Blackheath Village)
3. Store Street Coffee
4. Bloomsbury Coffee House
5. Prufrock
6. Department of Coffee and Social Affairs
7. London Review Cake Shop
8. Lantana
9. Monmouth (Covent Garden)
10. TAP (114 Tottenham Court Road)
11. Nude Espresso (Soho Square)
12. Kaffeine
13. Elliot’s
14. Fernandez & Wells (Exhibition Place)
15. TAP (193 Wardour)
16. TAP (26 Rathbone Place)
17. Flat White
18. Dunne Frankowski at Sharps
19. Notes Coffee Barrows (Borough Market)
20. Curator’s Coffee (Cullum Street)
21. Notes (Trafalgar Square)
22. New Row Coffee (New Row)
23. Monmouth (Borough Market)
24. Taylor Street Baristas (125 Old Broad Street).
25. Foxcroft & Ginger
26. Milk Bar
27. Notes (Covent Garden)
28. Merito (Swiss Cottage)
29. Damson Cafe
30. Goodge St. Espresso
31. Fernandez & Wells (St. Anne’s Court)
32. Alchemy
33. The Espresso Room
34. Fernandez & Wells (Somerset House)
35. Bar Italia
36. Speakeasy
37. Attendant
38. Peyton & Byrne (British Library)
39. FreeState Espresso (Southampton)
40. Wild & Coffee (formerly Wild & Wood)
41. The Association
42. Taylor Street Baristas (Monument)
43. Mother’s Milk
44. Giddy Up (Fortune Street Park)
45. Timberyard (Seven Dials)
46. Giddy Up (Bep Haus, Bow Lane)
47. Four Corners
48. Continental Stores
49. Macintyre Coffee (Hoxton)
50. The Hackney Pearl
51. The Wren
52. Knockbox Coffee
53. Ozone (Shoreditch)
54. Noble Espresso (King’s Cross)
55. Sacred Espresso (Torrington Place)
56. Artigiano (Paternoster Square)
57. Iris & June
58. Workshop (Clerkenwell Road)
59. Workshop (Holborn Viaduct)
60. Monocle Cafe (Chiltern)

Outside of London

1. Duke Street Espresso Bar (Liverpool)
2. Artisan Roast (Edinburgh)
3. Brew Lab (Edinburgh)
4. Condesa Coffee (Atlanta)
5. The Missing Bean (Oxford)
6. Colonna & Smalls (Bath)
7. Small St. Coffee (Bristol)
8. Coffee #1 (Cardiff)
9. The Barn (Berlin)
10. Chapter One (Berlin)

With a list this long, things start to get complicated. Some of these places are new within the last year. Others on the list don’t even exist anymore. And I’m sure the list is still incomplete. Still, it provides a great summary of the past year, taking in my travels throughout London and to other parts of the UK and the rest of the world. It’s not even close to the truly ambitious attempts to sample London’s coffee scene, but it’s a reasonable showing. Like the man said, I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

I should say, by the way, that this blog was never intended to be purely about coffee. The World Tour was a good forcing function to give me a reason to write blog entries. But as ever, I’m hoping I can create content on a variety of technical and non-technical subjects in the future.