Best Coffee Shops in Austin

Mozart's Coffee Roasters opened on Lake Austin Boulevard in 1993 and was the first Austin shop to roast in-house. It was also the first to put free wifi on the menu. Both of those facts say something about Austin coffee, which is that the city built its specialty program around two ideas at once. The first idea is that the room and the beans should both be the company's. The second idea is that the room should be designed around how people actually want to sit in it for two hours.

Three decades later, the Austin coffee map covers a ring twenty miles wide. Greater Goods roasts in Dripping Springs in the Texas Hill Country. Houndstooth holds the lobby of the Frost Bank Tower downtown. Flat Track on East Cesar Chavez shares a building with Dogspeed Cycles. Flitch on Tillery operates out of a remodeled 1952 Spartan trailer. Summer Moon on Manchaca Road runs every roast over an oak fire. Spokesman roasts in the St Elmo District. Bennu Coffee on South Congress is open twenty four hours. Texas Coffee Traders on East Seventh Street has been roasting since 1994.

None of these shops are trying to be Houndstooth. None of them sell the same coffee. They share a city and a set of priorities, which is why Austin works as a coffee town: the room and the beans are usually one operation, and the room is designed for sitting.

What makes Austin coffee different

The buildings started as something else. Mozart's deck was a lakeside lot. Flitch is a 1952 trailer. Summer Moon runs out of an outdoor trailer on Manchaca. Flat Track shares a roof with a bike shop. Houndstooth lives in a bank tower lobby. Spokesman runs out of a production roastery in the St Elmo District. The Austin specialty program rarely got the purpose-built coffee shop format that defined Portland and Seattle. It got converted spaces, trailers, and corners of other rooms. The coffee is excellent. The setting is rarely about coffee. That difference shows up in the way Austin shops carry themselves.

Downtown and South Congress

The downtown core and the South Congress corridor anchor the most foot-traffic-heavy programs.

Houndstooth Coffee at 401 Congress Avenue Suite 100c sits in the lobby of the Frost Bank Tower, which means you get downtown Austin foot traffic and a craft espresso bar in the same room. The menu usually carries four single origin espresso options, with rotating reserves like Mazateca from Mexico or Brisas from Colombia. Indoor and outdoor seating, La Marzocco hardware, baristas who can talk through the lineup without making you feel late. Order the Burundi single origin cortado if you want to taste why people walk three blocks past chain coffee to get here. Order the flat white if you came for a meeting and need it to land right.

Bennu Coffee on Congress at 515 South Congress Avenue is the twenty-four hour second location owners Stephanie and Steve Williams opened in May 2017, a couple of miles south of the original Bennu in central Austin. The coffee is organic and fair trade with the exception of the Iced Bennu, and the food rotates from Taco Mex, The Green Cart, Hoboken Pie, and a baked goods program. The room runs around the clock. Order the Iced Bennu if you came for the shop's signature drink. Order a drip and a Hoboken Pie slice if you arrived after midnight and need to settle in.

East Austin

The East side carries the city's densest specialty cluster, from Cesar Chavez Street north through Holly and into the Tillery industrial strip.

Flat Track Coffee at 1619 East Cesar Chavez Street shares a building with Dogspeed Cycles. Bikes on one side, a small coffee bar on the other. The shop has been on this block for years and roasts its own beans for the espresso and the rotating single origins on drip. Espresso pulls on a Mirage machine, which the staff will tell you about if you ask. The cyclist crowd shows up early, tools out and tubes in hand. Locals follow. Bike rentals run twenty-five a day with lights and a lock, which is the kind of detail that tells you what kind of shop this is. Order the single origin drip if you want to taste what Flat Track is roasting this week. Order a latte and a bike rental if you came to ride East Austin the way it was meant to be ridden.

Flitch Coffee at 641 Tillery Street Suite 110 operates out of a remodeled 1952 Spartan trailer at the corner of Holton and Tillery. Founder Erica Foster is a Wright Bros. Brew and Brew alum who named the trailer after the wood slabs cut from logs. Flitch works as a multi-roaster bar pulling from local and national roasters and partners with East Austin bakers and farms for the food. Order an espresso if you want to see which roaster Flitch is pulling that week. Order a drip and a pastry if you came to sit at the trailer for a bit.

Texas Coffee Traders Cafe at 3223 East Seventh Street has been roasting and selling coffee since 1994, one of the longer-running roasteries in the city. The Seventh Street location runs as cafe, retail, and a wholesale arm shipping daily roasted beans across the area, with a side counter for espresso machines, French press equipment, and tech service. The cafe opens early on weekdays and Saturdays. Order whole beans if you came for the daily roast that has fed Austin for three decades. Order an espresso at the bar if you want the house roast pulled in the room where it is sold.

The lake and the south side

West of downtown and south past Ben White, the Austin coffee day stretches into longer-form rooms. The lake deck, the wood-fire trailer, the St Elmo roastery — three rooms that take Austin coffee out of the office-and-meeting register and into the version of the city that locals actually live in.

Mozart's Coffee Roasters at 3825 Lake Austin Boulevard sits on the water with an outdoor deck cantilevered over the lake. Turtles surface in the afternoon, and cypress shade keeps the deck usable in August. Open since 1993, Mozart's was the first Austin shop to roast in-house. The signature Mozart Special is an iced mocha. House blends include the Espresso D'Oro and the Lake Austin Blend. Tuesday open mics run 8 to 11pm outside. The deck is one of the few public lakefront seats in Austin where you can sit for three hours and not get asked to leave. Order the Mozart Special iced mocha if you came for the version of Austin coffee that has been around since before South Congress was a destination. Order the Lake Austin Blend drip if you want to read on the deck for two hours.

Summer Moon Coffee Bar on Manchaca Road roasts every bean over a roaring oak fire. It is the only Texas roaster that built its name entirely on wood-fired coffee, which gives the lineup a smoke note no drum roaster can match. The Manchaca bar serves out of a trailer on the south Austin road, running early through evening seven days a week. Velvet Blaze is the balanced house roast. Inferno is the dark, smoke-edged version. Moon Milk, the house signature, gets poured into nearly every drink the regulars order, ingredients undisclosed by design. Sun and a few outdoor tables handle the seating. Order a Moon Milk latte if you want the drink that built Summer Moon into a Texas chain. Order a black drip of Inferno if you want the cup that proves the wood fire actually does something.

Spokesman Coffee at 440 East St Elmo Road A2 is the flagship of a three-cafe Austin operation, with the production roastery sitting in the same building as the cafe. The bar runs an espresso program plus a rotating lineup of craft draft beverages. Spokesman roasts for its own rooms and a wholesale book, and St Elmo is where the production work lives. The St Elmo District itself is the south Austin industrial corner that has turned over in the past five years, with food halls, breweries, and the Spokesman roastery anchoring the new tenants. Order an espresso if you want the house roast pulled in the room where it is roasted. Order something off the draft list if you came for the rotating cold side of the program.

North Loop

North of the river, the residential specialty register runs through North Loop, Hyde Park, and the Brentwood edge.

Epoch Coffee on West North Loop has been pulling shots for nearly twenty years, the original of three Austin shops and the only one open all night. The room runs twenty-four hours a day six days a week, closing Monday at midnight and reopening Tuesday at six. At three in the morning the bar fills with UT students, remote workers chasing deadlines, and night shift nurses cutting up from Mueller. Bookshelves stand fully stocked at every wall and outlets sit at every table by design. Iced Mojo is the signature, a cold brew cocktail Epoch has been pouring since the start. The Peach Matcha Latte is what regulars order in summer. Pastries come from East Side Pies and Green Cart, longtime partners. Order the iced Mojo if you came for the drink that built the original Epoch. Order a rosemary-salt bagel with a drip if you want the late night order regulars repeat at four in the morning.

Outside the loop

Austin coffee does not stop at the city limits. The hill country roastery cluster is the room locals drive for.

Greater Goods Roasting Co. at 160 McGregor Lane in Dripping Springs is twenty miles southwest of downtown Austin in the Texas Hill Country. The company is run by wife and husband team Khanh Trang and Trey Cobb, who founded the operation in 2015. Roasting happens here in small batches, with sourcing and quality control under the same roof. A portion of every bag goes to non-profit partners, both locally and at origin. The space welcomes drop-in visitors weekday mornings. Single origins make up most of the lineup. Espresso is dialed for nuance over weight. Order a single origin bag from the rotation if you want to take what Greater Goods is roasting this week home. Order the house espresso if you came for a shot in the room where the beans were roasted that morning.

A day across the city

An Austin coffee day that starts at Houndstooth in the Frost Tower lobby, runs a Flat Track espresso on East Cesar Chavez, and ends with a Mozart Special iced mocha on the Lake Austin deck is three rooms across three Austin registers. The buildings did not start as coffee shops. The coffee is excellent anyway. That is the city's version of the specialty program, and it has been the city's version since 1993.

The Pulled directory tracks every specialty cafe across the metro with check-in radius for the iOS app. The pillar reading on specialty coffee and cold coffee methods covers the rest. Pulled Coffee pays real cash via PayPal for visiting these shops. Visit /earn for the rules.