The 10 Best Coffee Drinks From Around the World, Ranked

Freddo espresso

What’s in it: a double espresso shaken hard with ice, poured over fresh ice

Greek espresso sales used to collapse every summer while the instant frappé ruled. In 1991 Yiannis Iosifides of the Athens roaster Kafea Terra fixed that: shake the espresso with ice until it turns creamy, then pour it over new ice so it stays strong. Industry estimates quoted by Coffee Intelligence in 2024 put cold drinks at 60 to 65 percent of Greek coffee consumption, with freddos making up most of it. It ranks tenth only because it is the baby of the list.

Order it like a local: ask for it sketo for no sugar, or add cold whipped milk for a freddo cappuccino.

Café de olla

What’s in it: coffee simmered in a clay pot with cinnamon and piloncillo

Pot coffee, and the pot matters. It is brewed in an unglazed clay olla with cinnamon and piloncillo, a dark cane sugar that tastes like molasses, and the clay adds an earthy edge steel never could. Its favorite legend credits the soldaderas who fed the armies of the Mexican Revolution after 1910. Historians suspect the drink is older, but the story stuck.

Order it like a local: drink it black. The sweetness and spice are already built in.

Carajillo

What’s in it: espresso and liquor, in Mexico usually Licor 43 shaken over ice

In Spain it is a working class morning order: coffee spiked with brandy, rum or anise. Nobody agrees on the name. One story says Cuban plantation workers drank it for coraje, or courage; a UNAM linguist told PUNCH it is probably a cheeky diminutive of a Spanish curse word. In the early 2000s Mexico City’s young crowd adopted the shaken Licor 43 version as the bridge between dinner and the party, and now it is everywhere there.

Order it like a local: say shakeado for a frothy shaken drink, or puesto for layers.

Yuenyeung

What’s in it: about three parts coffee to seven parts Hong Kong milk tea

Hong Kong refused to choose between coffee and tea. Yuenyeung blends both, sweet and creamy with evaporated or condensed milk, and it grew up at the open air dai pai dong stalls and cha chaan teng diners. The name means mandarin ducks, a famously mismatched pair that always travel together, which is exactly what this drink is. Starbucks even sold a Yuen Yeung Frappuccino there in 2010.

Order it like a local: get it iced, and expect it sweet unless you say otherwise.

Kaffeost

What’s in it: cubes of squeaky baked cheese dropped into hot black coffee

Yes, cheese in the coffee. In the far north, cubes of mild, squeaky cheese go into the cup, strong coffee goes on top, and the softened cubes get eaten with a spoon at the end. The habit is tied to the Sámi and to brutal winters, when frozen food was thawed in hot broth until coffee took the broth’s place. It is official now: the EU made kaffeost a protected designation of origin in June 2025, the same status Champagne holds.

Order it like a local: let the cubes soak for a minute, and save a spoon for the end.

Filter kaapi

What’s in it: dark roast coffee with chicory, dripped slowly, mixed with hot milk and sugar

Legend says the Sufi pilgrim Baba Budan smuggled seven coffee beans home from Arabia in the 1600s and planted them in the hills of Karnataka, which still carry his name. South India turned them into filter kaapi: a thick brew dripped through a stacked steel filter, usually with 10 to 20 percent chicory, cut with boiling milk and sugar. It is served in a steel tumbler inside a wide bowl called a davara, and poured between the two from a height to cool it and whip up froth.

Order it like a local: pour it back and forth yourself until it is frothy and cool enough to sip.

Turkish coffee

What’s in it: coffee ground as fine as flour, simmered with water and sugar in a cezve, served unfiltered

Its culture dates to the coffeehouses of 16th century Istanbul, and the method has barely changed: powder fine coffee simmered in a little long handled cezve and poured, foam and grounds and all, into a small cup. Sugar is chosen before brewing because it goes in the pot. UNESCO honored Turkish coffee culture in 2013, mostly for the hospitality around it. A famous proverb says one cup is remembered for forty years.

Order it like a local: stop before the bottom. That last bit is mud, and it belongs to the fortune teller.

Cafecito

What’s in it: espresso whipped with sugar into a pale, sweet foam called espumita

The trick is the first drops. The barista catches the most concentrated coffee and beats it with sugar into a tan paste, then adds the rest of the shot so a sweet foam, the espumita, rises on top. In prerevolution Cuba it sold from street carts for a few cents. In Miami it got a stage: as Felipe Valls Sr. told the Miami Herald, in 1963 he cut a walk up coffee window into the newly air conditioned El Oso Blanco market in Little Havana. The ventanita was born, and Valls later founded Versailles.

Order it like a local: order a colada and you get tiny cups for sharing with whoever is nearby.

Buna

What’s in it: green beans roasted on the spot, ground by hand and boiled in a clay jebena

This is coffee at the source. In the buna ceremony, green beans are roasted over a flame, passed around so everyone can smell the smoke, ground by hand and boiled in a jebena, a round clay pot with a long neck. Incense burns and roasted grain comes out as a snack. The grounds are brewed three times, abol, tona and baraka, meaning blessing, and as The Guardian reported from Kafa in 2024, it is considered rude not to offer all three cups.

Order it like a local: stay for all three rounds. Leaving after one is the real mistake.

Cà phê trứng (egg coffee)

What’s in it: egg yolks whipped with sugar and condensed milk, floated on strong coffee

In 1946, Nguyễn Văn Giảng was tending bar at Hanoi’s Metropole Hotel when fresh milk ran short. He whisked egg yolk with sugar and condensed milk into a thick pale cream and poured strong coffee underneath. Guests loved it so much that he opened his own place, Café Giảng, which his family still runs down a narrow Old Quarter alley.

It does not taste eggy. Think tiramisu meets warm custard, with bitter coffee rising through it. The hot version sits in a bowl of hot water, and you spoon the top before drinking what is below.

Why number one? Because it is the purest version of what makes this list great: a problem, solved with what was in the kitchen, so well that the fix outlived the shortage by eighty years. It might be the only coffee on Earth you eat before you drink.

Order it like a local: order it hot on a cool evening, and do not stir. Spoon the foam first.