The Pulled Journal
No credit card required. Works at any coffee shop.
298 posts
May 10, 2026
A latte is two ingredients and one technique. Get the espresso right, get the milk right, pour it together, and you have a cafe drink for the cost of a cup of beans.
Frothed milk is the difference between coffee and a coffee drink. Here are the five methods that work in a home kitchen, from steam wand to a jar in the microwave.
A clean coffee maker tastes like coffee. A dirty one tastes like everything else. Here is how to clean and descale every kind of machine, with both the vinegar way and the descaling solution way.
Pour over is the method that separates good home coffee from great home coffee. Here are the ratios, the grind, the bloom, and the three drippers that matter.
The moka pot is the pro at-home espresso alternative. Strong, fast, almost foolproof once you stop making the three or four small mistakes everyone makes. Here is the full method.
Use 1 part coffee to 15 parts water by weight. That is the answer. The rest of this guide is grind size, brew time, water temperature, and the small adjustments that turn a decent press into a great one.
Vietnamese coffee is one of the great coffee traditions of the world. A small metal filter, dark roasted beans, sweetened condensed milk, and time. Here is how to make it right at home.
Turkish coffee is the oldest method that is still made the same way it was made five centuries ago. Here is the cezve, the grind, the foam, and the small details that separate a good cup from a great one.
The Greek frappé is a summer institution. Instant coffee, cold water, sugar to taste, whisked into a thick stable foam. Here is how to make it the way it is actually made in Greece.
May 4, 2026
Washington coffee runs from Shaw down to the White House corridor. Compass Coffee built the original on 14th Street in Shaw in 2014 under two former Marines, Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez, and grew it into one of the largest independent roasters in the city.
May 3, 2026
Waimea sits at twenty-five hundred feet on the saddle between Mauna Kea and the Kohala Mountains, the cool plateau town where the Big Island ranches meet the coffee country. Waimea Coffee Company anchors Parker Square, founded by a family that built the program around the local altitude grade.
Waimea on Kauai's West Side is the historic plantation town that holds Hanapepe a few minutes away, the older Kauai before the resorts arrived. The coffee here is small, and the editorial coverage is narrow.
May 2, 2026
Wailuku is the working county seat of Maui, the old town at the base of Iao Valley where the morning still moves on a 1950s storefront pace. Maui Coffee Attic occupies a storefront on Kanoa Street that opened as the original coffee shop in town.
Waikiki is the resort grid most visitors arrive in, the strip of Kalakaua and Kuhio Avenues that runs from Diamond Head to the Ala Wai Canal. The coffee here splits between the resort lobbies and the Tokyo-side-street cafes that have grown into the upper end of Diamond Head.
May 1, 2026
Volcano is the village a mile from the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where the coffee runs on a different rhythm than the rest of the Big Island. The elevation is forty-one hundred feet.
Waianae is the Leeward Coast Oahu town that holds Kaupuni Place and the Small Boat Harbor, the part of the island that visitors rarely reach and that locals quietly defend. The coffee here is the working version.
April 30, 2026
Seattle is the city where modern American coffee was invented twice. Once with Starbucks in the early 1970s and again with Espresso Vivace and the Northwest specialty wave that followed.
April 29, 2026
Rome learned coffee from the Levant in the 1600s. Naples turned it into ritual. Milan made it efficient. A guide to where to drink in Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Turin.
A coffee in Tokyo can take eight minutes to prepare. The wait is not a tax on the coffee. It is the coffee. Japan's specialty scene built on kissaten patience and pour over precision.
For decades, Paris had a reputation among traveling coffee drinkers: the cafés are beautiful, the coffee is bad. Around 2010, that changed. A guide to Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseille.
There is no single American coffee culture. What the country has instead is five or six regional cultures that share a country and an Apple Wallet but very little else.
The first German coffeehouse opened in Bremen in 1673. Three centuries later, Berlin built a specialty scene that reshaped European coffee. A guide to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Leipzig.
Australia invented the flat white and exported its café model worldwide. Melbourne is the densest specialty coffee city in the world by a wide margin. A guide to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
For most of the 20th century, the United Kingdom drank tea and tolerated coffee. Then in the late 2000s, a small wave of London cafés brought specialty coffee to the city in a serious way. By 2015, the wave had become the establishment.
