what is cafe cincinnati?
read below to learn what makes cafe cincinnati different, what inspires us, and what we’re all about!
DISCLAIMER #1: NO AI
my blog posts are not written by artificial intelligence. what you read is from me, a fellow coffee-loving human.
DISCLAIMER #2: NO CRITICISM
i’m no coffee critic. my blog posts do not identify the faults of each coffee shop, but highlight their beautiful aspects instead.
passion for local coffee culture
Every city has its fair share of Starbucks, Dunkin, and Biggby, but not every city has the special coffee culture like ours.
So what makes Cincinnati coffee so unique?
CREATIVITY: The vibrant murals that transform our town into a gallery aren’t the only marks of this city’s right-side brain. If you’re looking for art, go to one of our museums for free. Music? Head up to Northside. Want a creative hangout? Walk down the street. But if you want all of the above, go to a local café!
HISTORY: You’ve heard of our beloved Over the Rhine. But its cobblestone streets and old Italian architecture barely scratch the surface of Cincinnati’s antique aesthetic. Look to Mount Adams for that old European feel, or Walnut Hills for stone churches, or Columbia-Tusculum if you’re feeling Victorian. All this history pours into our coffee community with the same timeless beauty.
FAMILY: We shout WHO DEY though we’ve never won a Super Bowl. We eat Skyline though we just had it last week, and the week before. We eat Graeter’s ice cream in winter and drink UDF milkshakes while we pump our gas. It’s a Cincinnati thing, and we are proud of it. We are a family, and we come together over coffee just the same.
inspiration
My drinking problem began in college, when I first left Cincinnati. Not because I needed caffeine, but merely because, as you know, coffee has a certain comforting feel to it. I liked the smell, and the warmth on my hands.
The college I attended was in a small town in East Tennessee, right outside of Chattanooga—if Folgers were a place, this would be it. It had all the vintage, small town, Southern charm to it, and housed plenty of cozy coffee shops full of students, hikers, artists, and town locals. There’s not one day I didn’t spend in one of these local shops, and almost all of my notebooks had some sort of coffee stain on them. The baristas knew my name and my order and I soon became part of a family. So when I returned to Cincinnati after graduating, I was eager to find this same type of community, but I found no help online. I found opinions and ratings on coffee shops, or directions to Starbucks, but nothing on Cincinnati’s community of fellow coffee lovers. Nothing on the personality, aesthetics, or flavors of Cincinnati’s coffee scene. I had to go out and search for myself, and what a world of beauty I found!
This is why I began Café Cincinnati—not to tell you which places to go and not to go, but to share the evident joy of our coffee community.