Pittsburgh Crawl

I haven't had a chance to bum around Pittsburgh for a while, and I've often thought that I may wind up down at some point in the future, so I dropped in for a really quick coffee tour.  Rainy day, but I found some nice brews.

Not terribly impressed with the latte at Make Your Mark, and that's with the advantage of first-caffeine-of-the-day.  Nice space, though.

Coffee Tree Roasters also pretty unimpressive espresso-wise; I didn't try the drip.  Big, high-volume place on a pretty swank street, though.

Needed some food, and the webs suggested Quiet Storm, at 5430 Penn Ave.

Ridiculously good veggie home-fry concoction FTW.  And while driving here I saw one of the other cafes on my list, so I stopped by:

Volotu Coffee

5467 Penn Ave

Really nice shop, pretty quiet.  Rocking 49th Parallel; their Epic Espresso has always been a favorite of mine.

Nice shot off their Synesso, great presentation.  I also got a Clever of a pretty nice, lemony Yirgachefe.

Tazza D'Oro

1125 North Highland Ave

Lovely cafe, nice decor, could totally see myself hanging out here for hours.  Brewing up Verve & Olympia coffees, quite unexpectedly--got a single-origin Colombian spro by Olympia that was quite tasty.

Espresso A Mano

3623 Butler St.

Hands-down my favorite stop of the trip.  This is the kind of shop I'd like to run.  Multi-roaster, great menu, GB/5 and K10 Fresh, staff looked like they were really on top of their game.  I had a shot of Counter Culture's Baroida--there is a reason people have been freaking out about this coffee.

In fact, it smelled so good that I forgot to snap a pic before devouring most of it.

21st St. Coffee and Tea

50 21st Street

Seriously good coffee in the strip district, an Intelligentsia account.  Had a really lovely v60 of a nice Rwandan.

They also had one of the best bits of bathroom reading material I've encountered:

All in all, good job Pittsburgh!  Really nice to see multiple locations doing some serious third-wave, and look like they're succeeding at it.  I didn't make it to Commonplace, thanks to one wrong decision on Pittsburgh's not-terribly-friendly-to-outsiders non-grid of a street system.  Also didn't make it to Orbis, formerly Aldo: things to do next time.  Looking forward to getting back down.