Sure, the company is approaching national chain status, complete with corporate ownership. It’s been a long time since we’ve been as impressed with a café as we were with Intelligentsia Logan Square. Bonus tip: visit Ipsento 606’s neighbor Red & White for a fantastic natural wine selection. The spacious, luminous café is popular with the laptop crowd, but it’s also a great space to sit at the bar and enjoy a recovery cappuccino after getting a good walk in. Right off the 606 elevated walkway, Ipsento’s second café features twin matte white Slayer Espresso machines, cold brew on tap, and a wine and cocktail menu for the evening hours. We had a sweet, syrupy shot of a Guatemalan single origin espresso, served with a glass of ice cold Topo Chico. Gaslight Coffee Roasters is one of several small batch roasters proving Intelligentsia isn’t the only show in town. Coupled with a good cup of coffee and it’s hard to think of a more perfect urban oasis.Ī notable feature of Chicago’s coffee scene: almost every shop we visited roasts their own coffee. Whether it’s the house plants, the gold cow skull, or the actual street lamps that hang over the bar, it’s the subtle details that make the space.
But perhaps what’s most memorable is the refreshingly unique atmosphere.
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There’s a lot that could be said about Caffe Streets: the Metric-roasted coffee, the gluten free waffles, the Italian spelling of café with its superfluous “f”. This espresso exhibited the juicy grapefruit notes the Kenyan variety is known for, while keeping the balanced sweetness one expects from a high quality El Salvador. This is also where I had the best single coffee of my Chicago café crawl: a single origin espresso of the El Salvador Malacara SL28. Although the shop is located on bustling Division St., the warm, Nordic-inspired interior feels perfectly at home in Wicker Park. It’s hard to miss Intelligentsia’s seventh and most recent Chicago café: the midrise building that hosts the shop features a site-specific mural commissioned by the pioneer roaster/retailer. On our most recent trip to the Windy City these five coffee shops stood out amongst a slew of great options.
But when it comes to coffee, Chicago has been a champion for a long time.
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Specialty-grade vendors still make up only 3 percent of the market, Oppenhuis said, but their growth isn’t limited to sagely gourmands - a quality cup can bring out the nerd in anyone.Against all odds, the Chicago Cubs are the 2016 World Series Champions. With more independent stores percolating every day, brewers like Passion House, Dark Matter, and Bow Truss are part of a rapidly developing cadre of coffee geeks. Food Republic named Intelligentsia an industry leader in 2011, and the homegrown coffee cognoscente just announced four new Chicago locations, as well as one in New York and one in San Francisco. “I’m just highlighting the process that came before this.”Ĭoffee connoisseurs are enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now in Chicago. “I don’t do any magic in the roasting room,” said Halfwit’s Christopher Oppenhuis. Like much of the brewing process, roasting is as much art as science - brown the beans too much and you char out whatever subtleties you gain from sourcing a good product under-roast them and you’ll have a comparatively bland cup. True coffee nerds can even quantify the drink’s extraction using a refractometer, which measures the movement of light through the liquid, indicating its density and total dissolved solids.īut first you need good beans, ground evenly and roasted to perfection. That will help give you the right “extraction,” meaning you’ve pulled out the coffee’s richness without making it too bitter. Probably the most important elements of brewing a perfect cup of joe are heat retention and total saturation - you don’t want fluctuations in the temperature of your brew, and you want to give the water enough time to fully mine the flavors of the ground coffee beans. So, to play out the doting teacher’s debrief, what did we learn? We love coffee, but have to confess some ignorance of its finer gustatory points.
The fine folks over at Halfwit Coffee Roasters are thrilled that coffee culture is maturing along the lines of the craft beer craze of late, and their tongue-in-cheek “science fair” Sunday captured the self-aware geekiness of high-brow baristas.Īlong with Fritz Pastry, they served up some welcome sustenance on a drizzly Sunday evening.Įducational posters stationed throughout Gaslight Coffee Roasters elucidated the science of coffee roasting, brewing and tasting, mimicking the presentation of a middle school science fair down to the colored construction paper decorations. Pour-over, slow-drip, aeropress - coffee can seem complicated these days, more fit for sommeliers or scientists than the casual sipper. Sara Travis, founder of Wormhole Coffee, prepares espresso.
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