T. Nguyen

A flat white at Two Guns Espresso

​If you walk into almost any coffee shop in the city and order a flat white, you'll most likely be steered towards ordering a latte instead. Sometimes, you'll be refused the flat white but offered a foam-less cappuccino to compensate. And while these may be acceptable (if even noticeable) substitutions for some, others may consider these sorry bastardizations of what they're really looking for: a lovely, creamy espresso-based drink smaller than a latte without the foaminess of a cappuccino. At Two Guns Espresso in Manhattan Beach, there is no need to settle for the next best thing: a flat white is a flat white is a flat white. The first choice is all yours.

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Flickr/Theodore Richard

​Finally, a way to mitigate the Starbucks caffeine high, or at least a chance to start fiddling with DIY energy drinks. The giant Seattle-based coffee company began selling wine and beer, as well as "more upscale food" (savory snacks! hot flatbread!) at a Seattle cafe in October, and now five stores in Seattle and one in Portland offer the drinks and larger menu items.

More importantly, of course, Reuters reports that we can expect up to a half-dozen booze-carrying Starbucks in Southern California by the end of this year. If you don't live on the West Coast, Starbucks has plans to open a handful of stores in both Chicago and Atlanta as well. So if you're a screenwriter who spends your days at your local coffeeshop, now you don't have to leave to go to the bar next door after, oh, seven hours of writing bad dialog. Just buy a CD of Tony Bennett duets and a beer and keep working. Lucky you.

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Handsome Coffee Roasters's coffee

​Handsome Coffee Roasters hoped to open their Downtown coffee bar right before the holidays, but what was supposed to be an early holiday present to coffee fiends is now a Valentine's Day gift to their fellow coffee lovers instead. According to Handsome Coffee's press release, their coffee bar will officially open in February in L.A. -- and New York.

Chris Owens, Michael Phillips, and Tyler Wells all were former high-ranking Intelligentsia employees before departing the company to launch Handsome Coffee. The trio turned an Arts District warehouse once home to a print shop into a makeshift office and headquarters, and built out the space to accommodate their roastery operations and retail coffee bar. Once open, a visit to Handsome Coffee will be a factory tour of sorts: a 13-foot glass and metal wall separating the roastery and coffee bar will give you ample view to drink up all the action.

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T. Nguyen

Clockwise: Pourover coffee at Coffee Tomo; an espresso from Handsome Coffee Roasters; siphon filters at Demitasse Cafe; a cappuccino from Broome St. General Store

​Like National Coffee Day, summing up the Year in Coffee compels a certain knee-jerk response: every year is the year in coffee. But, then again, not every year is a year in great coffee. With over a dozen new coffee shops, several new homegrown coffee roasters, and customers willing to learn about what's in their cup, 2011 was a great year for great coffee.

This great year was several years in the making, and we can credit shops Klatch Coffee, Jones Coffee Roasters, Caffe Luxxe, Venice Grind and Intelligentsia, among others, for laying the foundation. Crucially, once that foundation set, there still was plenty of room for innovation and experimentation: the great thing about the developing coffee culture here, we were told time and time again, is that L.A. is essentially a blank slate. Without the burden of a well-established coffee scene like, say, Seattle, shop owners had carte blanche to forge their own path and plant their own unique flags. And that they did.

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T. Nguyen

Coffee Commissary

​It used to be that you just needed one hand to count all the truly outstanding coffee shops in Los Angeles. Now, thanks to a recent surge of brave coffee geeks-turned-entrepreneurs, you need both hands to tick off all the stellar shops in the city, and maybe that isn't quite enough. We decided it was about time to stack up all those newcomers against our old favorites to come up with our definitive list of the ten best coffee shops in L.A., period.

Before we start the countdown, a word on our criteria. As coffee shops often serve as third spaces, everyone has intensely personal definitions of what makes a great café, and we're no different. We looked for shops that elevate your typical café experience with quality coffee beans, a warm ambiance, and skilled baristas who could pull perfect shots just as readily as they could smile with sincerity. At the end of the day, whittling our list down to just these ten, then ranking them, was an agonizing -- but welcome -- problem to have. If your favorite neighborhood Central Perk didn't make the cut, rest assured that it probably was number 11. And we just couldn't turn this list up to 11.

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T. Nguyen

At Espresso Profeta, all shots are ristrettos.

​There was possibly a time, a decade or two ago, when walking into a café and ordering a ristretto instead of an espresso meant something. A bold, strong, tasty version of espresso, maybe. Whatever it meant, it appeared to mean the same thing to the barista and the customer. That time has passed.

Now, the ristretto is "one of the most fiercely debated concepts in coffee and one with no definitive definition," Portola Coffee Lab owner Jeff Duggan says. "There's no automatic translation across the board about what it is," says Coffee Commissary's Tyler King. "People are all over the map about what it is, or is not," Handsome Coffee Roaster co-founder Michael Phillips says.

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Dripp

The interior of Dripp's coffee boutique in Chino Hills.

​A few years ago, Rabih Sater was working in the energy industry. A few years ago, the country was mired in a Great Recession, and the energy industry, like most other industries then (and now), slowed down considerably. Rather than holding out to become, say, an oil baron à la Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, Sater decided to focus on an entirely different type of black gold: coffee. His "coffee boutique," Dripp, opens in The Shoppes at Chino Hills this week and brings Intelligentsia beans and Turkish coffee to the Inland Empire.

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Pourover coffee at Cafe Dulce.

​Until recently, coffee barely registered a note in the many love songs to the foods and drinks that have made Los Angeles proud. Sure, great shops like Groundwork Coffee and Jones Coffee Roasters certainly existed here and there, but it was only in the mid-2000s that the city really saw a slow but steady rollout of shops obsessed with making perfect brews and pulling exacting espresso shots. But those, too, were sprinkled about the city; having a coffee shop like Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, Espresso Profeta or Spring for Coffee nearby was a neighborhood perk, like a Trader Joe's within walking distance or dogs that don't bark after 10 p.m.

Over the last year, though, this city has experienced a caffeine jolt. One after another, homegrown and transplanted Angelenos who love coffee as much as they love their city have set up shop. These newest cafes have philosophies as distinct as the coffee they brew: The hipster vibe of Intelligentsia, it seems, is only a model to be respected rather than emulated.

Riding this wave of new coffee shops are patrons -- us -- who, once indifferent to the bitterness in their coffees, now actively care to learn how great coffee can taste and are willing to try a cup or two and learn a thing or three, all for the simple pleasure of a properly made cappuccino.

We chose five of our favorite shops that are but barely one year young yet already have us singing their praises.

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Handsome Coffee Roasters coffee

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For the coffee lovers in the city, Handsome Coffee Roasters presents an early holiday gift: a December opening date. The coffee company founded by 2010 World Barista Champion Michael Phillips, Tyler Wells, and Chris Owens -- all of whom left top positions at Intelligentsia to pursue their own version of the coffee ideal -- is on track to open its retail space soon in a converted warehouse in the industrial section of Downtown.

Seating capacity at the shop will be between thirty and forty people, and Handsome promises to serve its own brand of coffee without the indifferently snobby attitude recently parodied in a Funny or Die video.

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T. Nguyen

An affogato at Intelligentsia's slow bar.

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Google allows its engineers to devote 20% of their full-time jobs to "work on what they're really passionate about." Similarly, Harvard & Stone has a "R&D bar" for visiting mixologists to beta test drinks. The closest thing to a coffee shop equivalent of the above may be Intelligentsia's slow bar in Venice, a unique platform that gives baristas the freedom to almost do anything she or he wants to do. "Working the slow bar is a barista's dream," says Charles Babinski, the Educator at Intelligentsia's Venice cafe.

The slow bar is set up in the back of the shop and is a rotating stage with different acts each week. The headlining barista of the week is, in essence, the stage manager as well as the star performer: he or she is solely responsible for conceiving, curating, and executing the bar's menu. For baristas who drink, eat, sleep, and live coffee, this is a unique opportunity to pursue ideas with the full blessing and support of one of the city's -- if not the country's -- best roasters. For willing customers, sitting at the slow bar is a rare chance to try drinks not found elsewhere.

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