Best Coffee for Beginners

Specialty coffee has a reputation for being precious and intimidating. Some corners of it are. But the fundamentals are accessible to anyone, and the path from drinking whatever is available to having genuine preferences is shorter than most people think.

Start with what you already like

If you drink coffee with milk and sugar, start there. Order a latte at a specialty cafe and notice whether it tastes different from what you usually drink. The quality of the milk steaming and the espresso will be noticeable even before you develop a vocabulary for describing it.

The first step toward black coffee

If you want to understand coffee's actual flavors, the path is reducing milk and sugar gradually rather than eliminating them suddenly. Try a cortado. Try a flat white. Try a cappuccino with better espresso than you're used to. The goal is to reduce the components that mask flavor rather than removing them all at once.

What makes specialty coffee different

Specialty coffee is defined by attention to sourcing, roasting, and brewing. The beans come from specific farms or cooperatives, are roasted with specific flavor goals in mind, and are brewed with attention to variables like grind size, water temperature, and ratio. The result is coffee that tastes like something specific rather than just like generic coffee.

Learning to taste

Start by asking the barista what flavors they taste in the coffee you're ordering. Then try to find those flavors yourself. You will sometimes find them, sometimes not, and sometimes find other things entirely. This is fine. Developing a coffee palate takes time and is better approached as exploration than as performance.

Practical starting points

A good first order at a specialty cafe is a pour over of the featured single-origin coffee with nothing added. It is the clearest expression of what the coffee is, and comparing it to other coffees you've tried builds context faster than any other method. Use the Pulled city guides to find good specialty cafes near you.

Related reading: what is specialty coffee, latte guide, how to use Pulled.

And while you are building your palate, Pulled Coffee pays you for every cafe visit.