Any list of coffee-centric cities is likely to include Seattle. In SmartAsset’s just-released “Best Cities for Coffee Fanatics” list for 2017, Seattle comes in at number one for the second year in a row, and it has topped similar lists for years. Coffee has long been associated with the Pacific Northwest and with Washington’s biggest city in particular. But Seattle’s relationship with coffee goes much deeper than being the site of the first Starbucks.  

In the late 50s, coffee became a favorite beverage of the counterculture, and the coffeehouse as we know it today was born. Seattle had some of the earliest coffeehouses to be frequented by beatniks, who proved that coffee was no longer only for an older, more conservative generation. Early coffee shops such as Café Encore, The Place Next Door and The El Matador became communities for young folk singers, poets and scholars. In 1967, the Last Exit on Brooklyn became a hotspot for chess players, and Café Allegro became the city’s first espresso bar in 1975. As cafes grew in cultural significance, more attention was paid to the quality of the product itself, and the Emerald City was well on its way to being one of the nation’s coffee capitals.

Even Starbucks began as a small operation that prized quality beans; founders Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Zev Siegl opened the first incarnation of the store using beans ordered from Peet’s Coffee and Tea in Berkeley, California. In 1976, Starbucks moved to its true flagship location in Pike’s Place Market and began its ascent to coffee celebrity. Although Starbucks is now internationally known, far surpassing the name recognition of Seattle’s independent cafes, Seattle’s thriving bean scene—boasting 1,668 coffee shops— shows that it supports java artisans at all levels.