World's best coffee spots

If your day is not complete without a cup of great coffee, why not make 2018 the year you make a pilgrimage? Jane Jurgens has some starters for your journey.

1. Sarajevo

Perched at the western end of the Silk Road, Sarajevo is the port through which the blessed bean first reached European lips. It's served here essentially in Turkish style — dense, rich, black and bitter. The ritual for making, pouring and drinking coffee in Bosnia-Hercegovina is a complicated affair. A little copper-plated pot with a long neck (a dzezva) goes on and off the stove, creating a coffee foam and if you want sugar you don't plonk a cube in your vessel, instead you place it under yourtongue to dissolve as you sip.

2. Wellington...or Sydney

Like Phar Lap and pavlova, there's debate about the provenance of the flat white. The Kiwi angle is that it was invented by Fraser McInnes at Cafe Bodega on Willis St in Wellington. Bodega has now closed, but the entire capital city remains a fine place for a coffee pilgrim to visit. Alan Preston claims he was the first to serve a flat white in 1985 when he opened Moors Espresso Bar, on Sussex St, in Sydney. Having moved from Queensland, Preston says he adapted a term from his native Queensland, where in the 1960s and 1970s coffee with milk was referred to as "white coffee—flat".

3. Vienna...or Northern Italy

Fancy coffee pretty much begins with the cappuccino (double espresso and steamed milk foam), which started to take shape in Vienna in the 1700s as spices and milk or cream were added to coffee. The bells and whistles were knocked off in northern Italy in the early 20th century, but it's still common to get a sprinkle of cinnamon today.

4. Pike Place Starbucks

The Original Starbucks in Seattle. Photo / 123RF

Know your enemy, fancy-coffee folk. As Starbucks has spread throughout the globe, the Pike Place store, known as the Original Starbucks, has pretty much kept its original appearance. The doors opened in 1971 and it would have been a radical place at the time. Pike Place Market, in downtown Seattle, is otherwise famous for the fish-throwing fishmongers.