La Mulita Coffee

The roaster sits in the same room as the counter, so the smell of beans turning dark is part of the experience of ordering. La Mulita is small. Genuinely small. The seating that exists is largely propped on top of stacked sacks of green Colombian coffee, which is either charming or impractical depending on what you came for and how you feel about sitting on a bag of agricultural product while drinking your latte.

The Colombia-inspired decor and the in-house roasting of Colombian beans aren't marketing language. The owners are working through actual sacks of actual coffee a few feet from where you're standing, and the product on the menu traces back to the bags you're sitting on. The vanilla oat milk latte is the drink that gets named most often by regulars, but the caramel and the honey cinnamon latte are both worth your attention if oat milk isn't your move. Order a glazed donut or the rye bagel with herb cream cheese. The monkey bread, when they have it, is the play, and the kind of pastry worth changing your order for.

Road cyclists park out front in groups on weekend mornings, refueling on the way to the coast. That tells you most of what you need to know about the rhythm here. This is a quick stop. Get a great coffee, eat a pastry, talk to whoever is behind the counter about Colombia or about the bike route, and move on.

Don't come here to camp with a laptop. There's barely room for you and your espresso, let alone you and a workday. The trade-off is that you get a tighter, more interesting cafe than the bigger laptop-friendly rooms can usually deliver. A small Colombian outpost on the New Hampshire coast that takes its beans seriously enough to roast them where you can watch.