The case for Everyday

Proper Coffee surfaces three tiers. We lean on the top one because that's the obvious thing a discovery site should do, and that's mostly where this site sends you.

Here's the wrinkle, though. Even when a Purist is on offer, most of what I drink, week in week out, is an Everyday. The thing nobody who works in coffee says out loud is that it's the same for them.

Purist is event coffee. You go out of your way, you sit in, you let the barista tell you what to have, and it's brilliant. The world is full of specialty roundups that'll point you at the gold stars when you've got the time to give them.

There's a way to make Purist work without setting aside the time, which is to fit it into something you were already doing. Festival in Bath, Colonna's five minutes from the Abbey. Solstice on the Tor, Finca on the way back into town. (That's what the Ulterior Motives column is for.) But it does require something to plan around, and most weeks don't come with one.

Everyday is for everything else. The five minutes before the train. The school run. The "I'm in the office, I want a flat white in the gap between two meetings." The flat white still has to be properly textured and the bean still has to be properly extracted, just in a way that fits the morning you're actually having.

Wells has Strangers with Coffee, which is the best in town and we say so. If I'm in Wells I'll end up at Loaf more often than not. London meetings put me in Southfields, where Wylie's is also properly excellent. If I'm working out of Homework though, I'll very happily do my coffee there.

Bath is where the full ladder is on the table. Colonna & Small's is genuinely Purist and the only place in town where you can drink Maxwell's coffee at the source. When I'm in Bath with time to give it, that's where I'm going. When I'm not, White Feather is on the platform, and that changes everything about getting in and out of Bath for a meeting. Before it existed I'd build five or ten minutes into the schedule to get something proper in town. Now I don't. That's not a compromise on the way to a Purist. That's what Everyday is for.

Here's the bit that doesn't get said enough. Finding an Everyday is genuinely hard. The internet has a top ten of every city's specialty scene; it does not have a useful answer to "I'm in this town for a meeting, where should I go that won't be terrible." Loaf isn't on most specialty guides. Neither is Homework. The answer to "which place near the station does the milk properly" is exactly the kind of question coffee writing should be answering and mostly isn't.

So Proper Coffee surfaces all three tiers and means it. Purist where it shines, because the gold stars matter and aren't always there. Specialty for another day (we'll come back to this one). Everyday because the middle of an ordinary week is where coffee actually lives.

If you've been to a city we cover and the place near your hotel was an Everyday, we did our job. You didn't need a verdict. You needed a coffee.

Richaro