The Café Dispatch #6
Spain's café boom, the return of analog, and why automation is losing its cool
Welcome to the Café Dispatch, a weekly letter about interesting café trends across the globe. If you enjoy it, please feel free to share it, and don’t forget to grab your favourite cup of coffee ☕️
I started this edition earlier last week, and then with the turn of events, I find myself editing it high up in the clouds, on my way to London for the week where I’ll be meeting my Perfect Daily Grind team for the first time since joining them earlier this year.
Last week was a complete disaster, I missed the Coffee Festival in Madrid, which I was really sad about. After planning it all in January, I had looked forward to witnessing the currently booming coffee scene in Spain - and to the Only You hotel boutique, which looked fabulous. But trains were cancelled, and flights were excruciatingly expensive (maybe Valentine’s Day shouldn’t fall on the same weekend in 2027 ?!) - so I passed.
Meanwhile, family issues accrued and alongside with that, my 9 to 5 kept me extremely busy (pivoting even as someone who’s done 8 hard pivots in the past 15 years…remains hard work!).
But enough about my travel drama, let’s talk cafés ☕️
The week before last, Starbucks announced something that felt almost impossible; growth for the first time since 2023; and it got me thinking about how everything eventually comes full circle. Starbucks has become this analog coffee shop souvenir for most of us, a relic from a time before specialty coffee became our entire personality, and GenZ seems to be absolutely captivated by that throwback energy. I won’t be surprised if very soon we start seeing advertisements styled like old J.Crew or Gap campaigns but with vintage Starbucks storefronts and drinks from the early 2000s, because nostalgia is one of the most powerful forces we have right now, especially when the present feels chaotic and unmoored.
While Starbucks leans into its own history, the rest of the coffee world is doubling down on something older, something deeper… We’ve spent years watching roasteries make their major moves forward, teaching us coffee lovers about the importance of origin and processing and the entire chain of hands that touch our beans before they end up in our cups. They’ve convinced us to think beyond the pretty space we sit in, though that certainly helps when we’re trying to decompress from whatever stress we’re carrying that day.
What I keep seeing across all of this, the Starbucks resurgence, the roastery education, the fetishization of craft, is a collective move toward tradition and tangibility, toward things we know our fast-paced, AI-saturated world cannot replicate or take away from us. We’re clinging to rituals that require human hands, human knowledge, human care. The perfectly pulled espresso that a machine can’t quite nail. The conversation with a barista who remembers how you take your coffee. The small ceramic cup that feels substantial in a way that convenience never will.
It all stems from the same place, this hunger for something real in a world that increasingly feels synthetic. Whether it’s GenZ romanticizing the Starbucks their parents frequented or specialty coffee devotees obsessing over single-origin processing methods, we’re all reaching for the same thing; proof that not everything can be automated, optimised, or replaced by whatever’s more efficient.
We’ve built this entire mythology around the independent café, the single-location roaster, the hidden gem that only locals know about, and we’ve convinced ourselves that this is the only legitimate way to experience coffee. But watching Syra Coffee, Good News Coffee, East Crema Coffee, Hola Coffee, Nomad Coffee, and The Coffee open location after location across Spain, I am starting to see things differently.
There’s something few of us - coffee lovers- will admit, many of the independent cafés we visit serve coffee that is genuinely, disappointingly mediocre. I would bet that for every neighbourhood spot serving coffee that makes you understand why people dedicate their lives to this craft, there are five places serving burnt, over-extracted liquid regret while the barista treats you like you’re personally responsible for the commodification of their art form. I know we don’t like to hear it, but please tell me you’re noticing it too.
Meanwhile, the multi-location cafés that we love to dismiss as soulless, they’re doing something radical in their ordinariness; they’re making good coffee boringly, predictably, reliably excellent. And that boring reliability, that ability to walk into a location you’ve never been to before and know with absolute certainty that your flat white will be properly textured and, will taste like someone actually cares, that’s not a compromise, that’s a revolution(!)
These chains are training more baristas in a single year than any collection of independent cafés could dream of, educating customers who thought Nespresso was the pinnacle of coffee, and making specialty coffee accessible to people who don’t live in trendy neighbourhoods or have time to café-hop in search of the perfect pourover.
The independent cafés will be fine, the truly excellent ones will always have their devoted followings, but these chains are doing the harder, less celebrated work of making quality accessible to everyone else. The real victory isn’t keeping good coffee rare and special and hard to find. It’s making it so common that we can all enjoy the craftsmanship going into brilliant specialty coffee - daily.
Currently obsessed with: Noun in LA.Literally stumbled across this place while writing this dispatch—it's a coffee-by-day, wine-bar-by-night space designed with serious 90s vibes. The designers talked about creating a space that feels nostalgic but fresh. It hits that sweet spot where Gen Z's fascination with a time they never knew meets our collective need for spaces that feel human, not algorithmic.
Recently visited with my honest POV:
Maleva Bakery in Marbella town. A small, very quaint bakery that does delicious croissants and serves coffee from Santa Coffee Málaga. It’s a little hidden, and all you need is to walk by it to get a whiff of delicious baking smell and needing to stop.
Sentir Café in Málaga. I didn’t make it to Madrid, so we drove out to Málaga for the day - so much is happening on the coffee scene, and this small café served Santa Coffee, but their flat white was tiny and poured in a very cute see through cup.
Santa Coffee in Málaga. It was truly a week of Santa beans… from Marbella to Málaga. This time I grabbed a takeaway cup but mostly, a bag of Nicaragua beans, and I’m pretty pleased with the fantastic colourful design of their bean bags!
Julie Hanell works for Perfect Daily Grind, and writes The Coffee Dispatch from Paris and Málaga. Want to see more? Check out her LinkedIn.
Thank you for highlighting such an uncomfortable yet true issue, Julie: not all specialty coffees are well served. The subtitle “specialty” no longer guarantees anything. For the past few years, we’ve often left our cups unfinished in many of the new openings in Spain.
We even run a simple comparison test: we buy the beans, take them home, and from that very same cup we once abandoned, some of our favorite coffees have emerged.
A sad reality, a consequence of a runaway system that long ago lost sight of doing things with care and a true spirit of service.
Ahhhhh my dose!!! Thank you!