Seattle may still be king when it comes to coffee, but San Diego isn’t too far behind in the latest ranking of the best cities for java fanatics.
The website SmartAsset last week named San Diego as the sixth best coffee city in the U.S. Seattle took the top spot and was followed by New Orleans, Portland, San Francisco and Oakland.
The website collected data on the 100 largest cities in the country, and looked at their total number of coffee shops, the number of coffee shops per 100,000 residents, Yelp ratings, the average price of a cappuccino, the total number of coffee and tea manufacturers, and Google search traffic for coffee compared to the national average.
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Jessica Percifield Henry, who blogged about coffee before starting the San Diego Coffee Network in 2014, said the city’s burgeoning coffee culture is just beginning.
“When we started the Coffee Network, our goal was to put San Diego on the map as a coffee city,” Percifield Henry said. “I was very surprised that the culture wasn’t very visible.”
The group works with local coffee shops and roasters to organize gatherings such as tastings and latte art competitions. Percifield Henry said its first event drew community roasters and baristas as far as Tijuana.
“We were sitting there going, ‘Is there anybody going to show up to this thing?’” she said. “We just didn't know. We organized it. We put the word out. We got nervous, and suddenly there was no room.”
San Diego’s location makes its coffee culture unique, Percifield Henry said.
“We consider Tijuana very much part of the greater San Diego coffee community,” she said. "We have this cooperative community that crosses border.”
She emphasized the importance of San Diegans going to their neighborhood coffee shop.
“It's a choice that supports the local economy because a lot of these shops, they use local bakeries. They use local purveyors of sometimes T-shirts and totes and different things that they source — all locally made,” Percifield Henry said. “You're (also) supporting better wages and better treatment at the global farming community.”
