The best coffee in Tacoma is easier to find than to catch. This city closes early. Most of the independent cafes below shut between 2 PM and 6 PM, several close two days a week, and a good number of the best ones are closed before midafternoon. Plan around the clock here in a way you would not have to in Seattle.
The better news: twelve of the shops on this page roast their own. Four roast at the address you visit, one roasts across town in a building of its own, four roast a drive away, and three do not say where.
Here are all forty three we have been through, by neighborhood, with the two just outside the city line at the end. Every shop links to its page in our coffee directory, with the address, the hours by day, the Google rating and what it is best for. Ratings are Google’s, as of September 2026. This is not a list of every coffee business in Tacoma. It is the list we have actually done the work on, and the South End has more we have not reached yet.
If you only have one morning
Bluebeard Coffee Roasters on Sixth Avenue for the room and the house style. Olympia Coffee Roasting in Proctor for the best designed room on this list. Campfire Coffee Co downtown for the only room in the city with an electric fire pit and camping chairs. Valhalla Coffee Co. if you want the twenty year old classic espresso program rather than a flavored board. Curran Coffee in Old Town if you would like to carry the cup into Tacoma’s oldest tavern through the open doorway.
Downtown
Campfire Coffee Co, 1554 Market St #101. Quincy and Whitni Henry opened Campfire in July 2020 to make specialty coffee and the outdoors feel like rooms anyone can walk into. They roast their own almost daily, five pounds at a time in a drum over an open flame, and Quincy brought the fire handling from nearly ten years in a BBQ restaurant. Campfire does not publish where the roasting happens, so treat it as their coffee, not a machine you will see here. Forest wallpaper floor to ceiling, camping chairs instead of cafe furniture, an electric fire pit. Closes at 2 PM (1 PM on Sunday), so this is a morning…