Drip Studio HNL

SPECIALTY

1114 Fort Street Mall, Honolulu, 96813

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Drip Studio HNL is a specialty coffee shop located in Honolulu, HI. Check in here with the Pulled Coffee app to earn real cash rewards. Specialty shops count toward all challenges including Pulled 50, Pulled 100, and Pulled 300.

Drip Studio HNL sits at the mauka end of Fort Street Mall in downtown Honolulu, the kind of address where lunchtime office workers and pour-over regulars share a counter. Owners Pohaku and Kelsie Mercado-Uehara built the program around a rotating multi-roaster bean bar, with beans from Rose Coffee Roasters in Switzerland, Portland Ca Phe in Oregon, and White Nene on Hawaii Island, plus their own small-batch roasts. Pohaku keeps a coffee bible at the counter listing forty-plus single origins he is in conversation with at any moment. Toasts are sourdough, made in-house. Pastries are baked on site. The crowd splits between downtown professionals on a tight clock and people who came specifically to ask what is on the bar today. Order the rotating pour-over and let the barista pick if you trust the room. Order an espresso and a sourdough toast if you came to work for an hour.

About Honolulu

Honolulu coffee runs across two registers at the same time. The Kaimuki bench, where neighborhood regulars settle in for a Saudi cardamom pour at Mirage Art and Coffee on 10th Avenue, a chasen-whisked Uji matcha at Daily Whisk inside Ten Tomorrow, or a Kona pour-over at Bean About Town on Waialae. And the downtown corridor through Fort Street Mall and Waimanu, where Drip Studio HNL anchors the contemporary specialty register and Cafe VNTG runs a Brazilian-leaning bar inside a vintage furniture warehouse in Kakaako.

Coffee here grows on the islands. Kona, Kau, and Maui lots show up alongside Ethiopian and Yemeni preparations. Most cafes pour something local. Bean About Town runs a 100% Kona program with the SL34 and Red Bourbon lots when they are in season. Talk Kaimuki, which Liz Schwartz opened as Coffee Talk in 1995 at the Waialae and 12th Avenue intersection, still runs a Sumatran-forward house program and the haupia latte regulars built years ago.

The neighborhood map is the city. Kaimuki holds the slow Saturday-morning bench. Kakaako runs the contemporary cafes around the SALT block. Downtown and Chinatown stretch from Fort Street Mall to Waimanu Street. Waikiki holds the visitor-volume rooms including the Junbi matcha bar at Royal Hawaiian Center and the Dean and Deluca outpost on Kalakaua. The result is a small city that drinks more carefully than its population would suggest, and a circuit that crosses three or four neighborhoods inside a half-day walk.