This is the final post in a series of posts about my favourite cafes in Melbourne. If you have come straight to this page, you might prefer to start reading from part 1, part 2, part 3, or part 4.

My top nine cafes in Melbourne

So here’s the list! Feel free to print this out, and take it with you on your next coffee crawl. You have my permission to start drooling… wait for it… a little longer… NOW!

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, ranking these cafes was a really hard task. Dan and I also disagreed on the order. This is mostly because we both drank different cups of coffees, and so had different experiences of flavour and consistancy.

Anyway, let’s talk about number…

2 — The Maling Room

Corner Maling & Canterbury Roads
Canterbury
(Show in Google Maps)

www.malingroom.com.au

Yes, I spelt that correctly! This was the first cafe that we went to on our crawl and is located about a two minute walk from the Canterbury train station in an old post & telegraph office. It’s so close to the train station, that we learn the hard way that you can still catch the train if you see it coming while you are standing out the front! Unlike many of the other cafes we visited, which are old buildings made funky, The Maling Room has a classic style. Sitting down there made me feel like I had slipped into a wormhole and been taken back to the good old colonial Melbourne days:

“Bring me my pipe and shot a whiskey… and hurry up with that telegram old chap. The sheep won’t shear themselves!”

I had had heard many people talk about this place, so I had very high expectations. So when my rather average tasting, standard shot, flat white arrived I was disappointed. It was weak and had no interesting characteristics. It was probably half of a double shot that was split into two cups — with the other cup getting most of the liquid.

Just as I started to wish that I had ordered tea instead, Dan started raving about his double ristretto flat white. So, I ordered one… and… it was pure bliss! Every coffee I had after that was just as good. I’m guessing that my first must have been an infrequent dud! However, it was that first coffee that pushed this great cafe from number 2, to number 1. Every coffee that Dan had here was amazing, so he ranking The Maling Room as his no. 1!

These guys roast their own coffee and it’s pretty good! This place is defintely worth the train ride out to Canterbury! On our last day in Melbourne we came here again. One of the guys recognised us from when we bought some beans a couple of days before. Anyway, he bought us out a taste of some plunged Harrar. OMG, it was by far the best tasting plunger I had ever had in my life So fruity, so light, so smooth, and so blueberry. That cup of plunger perfection has actually motivated me to drink plunger at home more often.

1 — St Ali

12-18 Yarra Place
South Melbourne
(Show in Google Maps)

www.stali.com.au

This was my favourite cafe of the crawl. Why? Maybe it was the modern atmosphere created by of an old building being turned into a funky cafe? Maybe it was the fast & friendly service? Maybe it was the extremely tasty food? Maybe it was coffee? Or maybe it was because they were roasting coffee in the same open area of the cafe? Anyway, this is my favourite cafe in Melbourne!

Like most of the cafes we went to, these guys also offered a single origin of the day. Since we went there twice we had three different blends / beans all up and they were all good! The only caffine headache that I got while in Melbourne was caused from my uncontrollable desire for more of the smooth St Ali goodness.

Anyway, it’s a great place to go for coffee! I love how all of their coffee roasting is going on before your eyes — turns out that they roast almost all day every day. They must roast a lot of coffee! The place was also packed both times that we came here. However, St Ali is such a finely tuned machine that our drinks and food came faster than most cafes would be able to when they were empty :-)

The staff were more than happy to give Dan & I a quick tour of the roasters and bean storage, etc, so make sure you ask to have a look around. The coolest thing though was that the dude who showed us around had heard about us. Stu had gone there a month or two before and had told the guy about how we roast our own coffee at home. So when we were there he was telling us about these guys from Tassie who roast their own coffee!

Anyway, definitely check this place out if you are in Melbourne. You’ll you happy you took the short tram ride (or walk) from the CBD.

End of the crawl :-(

Well that’s the end of this Melbourne Coffee Crawl series. I hope you’ve found these reviews / comments useful! It’d be great to hear what you have to say, so leave some comments below! :-)

#4 — Liar Liar

90 Kinkora Rd
Hawthorn
(View in Google Maps)

Coming in at number four is Liar Liar. This is a large, funky cafe with a modern decore, and a chilled atmosphere. It was a great place to just sit down, have a drink, and reflect on all of the cafes we had already gone to that day. Atmosphere wise, it reminded me of Elaia in Launceston (where I’m current sitting writing this post). We were also the only people there as we arrvied just before they closed. The upside of this was that they needed our help to polish off some cake!

The first thing that grabbed my attention about Liar Liar was the menu. Most cafes have a long and complicated menu of all the different formats of coffee: latte, flat white, short/long black, and so on. Not this place! Here the menu consisted of a number of different origins of coffee beans that you could choose from! If I was black, it would have been the perfect time to say, “That’s what I’m talking about!” However, since I’m a ranga, I kept my mouth shut and just took a photo of it.

I’m not going to go into detail about how good the coffee was here. The fact that I’ve ranking it in the top four should speak for itself. What I do want to talk about though is their Clover machine. If you have no idea what a Clover is, that’s ok, because neither did I until I came here. They are quite a complicated, big, and rare machine. The guy from Liar Liar said that his machine was one of five machines in Australia. Anyway, we got to go behind the counter and watch this thing in action. The coffee that it produced was like nothing that I’ve ever had before! It had the flavour of a lightly roasted fruity coffee, but the texture of tea. The one word I’d use to describe it would be “clean”.

So in short, this place is great! I’ll defintely be paying it another visit or two next time I’m in Melbourne. It’s well worth the few blocks walk from the nearest train station.

#3 — Seven Seeds

114 Berkeley St
Carlton
(Show in Google Maps)

www.sevenseeds.com.au/

Seven Seeds is in a weird location for a cafe, and if it wasn’t for the sign out front we wouldn’t haven’t picked there was a cafe here. Regardless of this, it was buzzing with life. It has only recently opened and they have done an awesome job of making an old warehouse look funky. For example, there are hooks on the wall for you to hang up your push bike and in another part they are using sheets of old piano player music as wallpaper. There is one word to describe the interior of this cafe — art. Even if you don’t like coffee, this place is worth checking out, even if you just have cake. Here’s a photo of their coffee machine that I’m “borrowing” from Dan’s Facebook.

Until I got here, I didn’t really feel like drinking another coffee. But once I was inside I couldn’t resist. We sat down so that we could look through into the coffee lab (yes, you heard me correctly) and roastery. If my memory serves me correctly, there were offering a choice of two blends. The coffee was so tasty here that I had to order a second, even thought I was already caffinated! As for the beans, these guys roast their own coffee on the premises and also supply their other cafe Brother Baba Budan

If you are there on a Saturday morning, you can join in on a public cupping session. I wish we had known about that. Unfortunately they didn’t want to give us a tour around the roaster, etc, but it was still great to chill out and soak in the atmosphere. It’s only a few block from the city, so defintely, defintely, defintely check this place out! Here what the front looks like from the roof of a Google branded car from back before it was Seven Seeds:

#8 — Social Roasting Company

5 McKillop Street
Melbourne

socialroasting.com.au

This is one of only two places (that I know of) where you can get great a coffee right in the CBD. If you are surprised that you haven’t heard of this place, then you might know them by their previous name, Octane. They roast their own beans (if you didn’t pick up from their new name) and are also located at Flemington (we didn’t go here, but that’s where they roast).

This was the last café that we went to while in Melbourne. After learning the hard way they don’t open on Sundays, we tried again on the way back to the airport. With all our bags on our back we walked in, made our order, put down our bags, and started chatting to the kiwi behind the coffee machine. Actually, we kept standing there talking to him until we had to go. Seats are so yesterday :-P

At first I was worried when I saw the barista use a spoon to remove the froth from the jug. However, my hope was restored when he poured our two classic-cup flat whites with good looking latte arts. I think one was a rosetta and the other was a heart.

Even though it was only 2pm it was already my 5th coffee for the day. Neverless, it was still very enjoyable. I can’t go into too much more detail about it because we only had 15 minutes to find this place, caffeinate up, and then get ourselves out the door and to the airport.

If you enjoy coffee (which you must since you are readying this) then you should defintely come here next time you are in the CBD. I defintely won’t be leaving this place until last on my next trip! Sorry, no photos. The Google car didn’t drive past here and we were in too much of a rush :-(.

#7 — Primary Cafe

399 Royal Parade
Parkville

Even though it’s not technically in the CBD, you can’t use that as an excuse for not dropping in to this wonderful cafe. It takes no effort (or time) to jump on a tram and be electromagnetically transported here. In fact, it’s so close to the tram stop that we managed to stay dry even though it was pouring with rain.

Apparently it’s not uncommon (thumbs-up for double-negatives) for somewhat well known people to drop in here. I say “somewhat” because while we were sitting down enjoying our flat whiles, Dan noticed somebody walk through the door, and it wasn’t a stunning blonde :-P.

“Hey, look who just walked in the door!” - Dan

“A person with hair?” — I asked.

“You know, Robert Harvey!” - Dan

“Who?” - Me

Apparently I’m pretty out of the loop because I have no idea who he is. Dan reckons he’s some footballer or something!

“Football, what’s that?” — I should have said. So if you’re like Dan and can recognise famous(ish) people walk through doors, then this place is for you :-)

Anyway, we ordered flat whites and pulled up seats at the large communal table. We had pretty high expectations since this is the home of Erin Sampson — an apparently well know latte artist. Even though she was away at a latte art competition, our coffees certainly weren’t lacking art! Here’s a photo of one of the coffees that Dan had. I wish I could pour tulips like that!

These guys use Veneziano beans, and I really enjoyed the coffee that I had here. Veneziano itself gave us slightly better tasting shots, but they were all single origins. I wish that could go into further detail about the flavours in all of the coffees we drank while in Melbourne. But my memory is getting bad in my old age (that’s a joke, laugh here). I’ll definetely be taking a notebook on my next coffee crawl!

Primary just keeps pumping out brilliantly made coffee that not only tastes great but has awesome artage. There’s only one or two cafes in Tasmania (that I know of) that are around this standard! It’s a cool place to chill out with friends over a coffee and some lunch. The interior is modern & funky and the food tastes amazing and is still reasonable priced. This place is definitely worth the short tram ride out of town!

Stay tuned to find out what the next six must visit cafes are. If you agree, disagree, or have something else to say, it’d be legendary of you to leave some comments below. It’d be great to hear what you have to say!

The trip was really awesome, fun, & satisfying. What could be more satisfying than walking into a cafe where you are greeted by friendly staff, taken in by the funky decor and groovy & uplifting music, and only moment later be drinking a shot of amazing coffee that is only fit to be drunk by God himself? I defintely had no excuse to sing, “I can’t get no… sat-is-fac-tion”.

Dan had been given a list of cafes to visit that had been separated into two groups: Must visit and Worth visiting if in the area. That list was invaluable as it kept leading us from awesome coffee to awesome coffee. Since I’ve been back, a number of people have asked where they should go for coffee in Melbourne. So, here is the official list of Humphreys Top Nine Melbourne Cafes. I know that nine is a weird number to countdown from, but we only went to nine cafes, and they are all worth mentioning.

This is the first of four or five posts that I plan on posting over the coming week. The first few posts will discuss/review a few cafes each, with the final post revealing my favourite Melbourne cafe. So, if you enjoy coffee and plan on being in Melbourne at some point in your life, make sure that you subscribe! Even if you aren’t a coffee obsessed nut like me, you will definitely be thankful you went to one of these places.

My Disclaimer: I’ve only been to these places once or twice, so I’m not able to comment on many things — especially consistency. For example, I could have gone to a really crap cafe, but fluked a good brew. Likewise, I could have been really unlucky and have been served the only “not awesome” coffee they made all year. Also, my comments are completely biased towards what I like/disliked and how I felt on the day. Your opinion of the place may completely different, and that’s ok Other than that, I wish you all happy drinking!

So let the countdown start at number…

#9 — 7 Grams

505 Church St
Richmond

This is the home of the national latte art champion Con. I went here a about a year ago and my flat white not only tasted amazing, but it was topped off with a perfect double rosetta! This cafe has also been highly recommended by many people and appears in many of the “Best cafe” lists that I have read.

Unfortunately, my excitment about 7 Grams was short lived. Maybe I was completely over caffinated (I had already had 4 shots by then that day)? Maybe a new staff member was being trained or on trial and they didn’t have the same standard of coffee as this place is know for? Maybe some terrorists had staged an attack on 7 grams, swapping all the Veneziano beans with some second rate stale rubbish? Oooh, i should call that in to the terrorism hotline! Which of these possibilities was the reason? I’m not sure.

I’m am disappointed to say that this was the worst coffee that I had for the entire trip. Home of the national latte art champion? I’m sure it is, but I’m guessing he wasn’t there that day because I didn’t know that a “speckled milky-way” was considered latte art . I know many people will be annoyed at me for placing 7 Grams at #9, but this ranking is completely based on my most recent visit. Anyway, here’s what the shop-front looks like from the top of a Google car and below that is a good looking bearded guy sitting inside 7 Grams:

It’s here that I should mention that while in Melbourne our taste buds were treated to a very high quality of coffee. So in reality, the coffee I had there was still pretty amazing. I’m just saying that out of the specially selected cafes that we went to, this one served up the worst cup. You would, however, be doing an amazing job to get a better brew than this anywhere in Launceston!

7 Grams is less than a block from the East Richmond train station. So if you find yourself on a train that is coming to a stop at East Richmond jump out and grab a coffee. Hopefully you’ll have better luck than we did I’ll defintely giving it a second chance next time I’m in town. Check out the mini-map below or view in full at Google Maps.

If you’ve been to 7 Grams it would be awesome if you could leave a comment below as tell us about your experience!

That concludes part one. Stay tuned, because I’ll be posting the next three cafes in a day or two :-)