On our penultimate day in Massachusetts, we packed up our rental house and drove into Boston, dropping off our luggage at the hotel and the car at the car-hire office. It was a swelteringly hot afternoon and I wasn't planning to visit Gracenote Coffee's Boston coffee shop until the following day but when I realised I was so close to its location in the Leather District near South Station, it would have been silly not to go.

One of my favourite coffee shops from my visit to Boston in February was George Howell Coffee's beautiful flagship café in the Godfrey Hotel on Washington Street in Downtown Coffee. Last time, I didn't have chance to stop by their first Boston café at the lovely indoor gourmet-food market, Boston Public Market, next to Haymarket station, but I made it a priority on my recent trip.

The city of Portland, Maine, lies about 100 miles north of Boston and is the Pine Tree State's largest city, although still compact and easily explorable on foot or bike. The route from Gloucester, MA, where we are staying passes by Portsmouth and Kittery, which we visited last week, but I wanted to spend a full day in and around Portland and it's a relatively straightforward two-hour drive up the I-95, so we decided to make two separate trips. If you are car-free, the train from Boston takes about 2h30, so it's just about do-able as a day trip, although there's enough to do in and around Portland to keep you occupied for two or three days.

When I first started to look into the speciality coffee possibilities for my trip to Massachusetts a few months ago, about the only place outside the Boston area that I found was Little Wolf Coffee, a cafe–roastery in the small, historic town of Ipswich. There was a nice Sprudge article a few months ago about Little Wolf's awesome wolf-themed packaging and branding — which was a big draw for me both as a fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers (AKA Wolves) and in terms of the design.

After a gorgeous sunny day at the wonderful Good Harbor Beach on Wednesday, the weather was a bit more unsettled yesterday so we decided to drive up to the Kittery Outlets, a few miles over the Maine border, for a bit of retail therapy. I had done a bit of research beforehand and come to the conclusion that there wasn't any speciality coffee to be had in the town of Kittery and so didn't bring my camera with me.

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you may know that I'm currently on holiday with my family in Massachusetts. We're staying at a beach house near Gloucester on Cape Ann, about 40 miles northeast of Boston. To the best of my knowledge, the only speciality coffee on Cape Ann is that which I am making in our rental house (I brought some coffee from Catalyst and Five Elephant with me), although there is a coffee shop and roastery I'm looking forward to checking out in Ipswich.

Update (August 2017): Rather than creating a new guide following my return to Boston and Cambridge in July and August 2017, I've added the three new coffee shops I visited — Broadsheet Coffee, Gracenote and George Howell at Boston Public Market — to this post and map. Read on for more Massachusetts specialty coffee delights!


As I mentioned in my last post, I used to travel to Boston fairly frequently but hadn't been to the city for almost a decade until a conference took me there last week. I was just starting to get into specialty coffee back in 2007 and I don't think Boston had yet hopped onto the third wave, although I did find this photo in my archives, which I took at Caffè Vittoria — an almost-90-year-old Italian cafe (caffè, technically) in the North End — in December 2005. It may be my first ever 'arty' photo of a cup of coffee, although I hadn't yet got the hang of bokeh.