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Toby's Estate Coffee
Toby's Estate Coffee traces back to Australia, where founder Toby Smith built a coffee roasting business before bringing the brand across the Pacific to Brooklyn, opening a Williamsburg location that helped introduce New York to the more milk-forward, technically precise espresso style that Australian and New Zealand cafés had already been refining for years. That Australian coffee sensibility — a focus on flat whites and carefully steamed milk texture alongside single-origin pour-overs — was still a relatively unfamiliar style on the New York coffee scene when Toby's Estate arrived, and the Williamsburg shop became one of the reference points for what that specific approach could look like stateside. The Williamsburg café itself leans into an industrial-modern aesthetic that fits the neighborhood's broader design language, with roasting happening on-site so the beans in the espresso machine and the beans in the roaster are separated by only a few feet rather than a supply chain. That combination — an imported coffee tradition, on-site roasting, and a design sensibility that matches Williamsburg's own — has kept Toby's Estate a genuine destination rather than just a convenient stop, for anyone specifically curious what a flat white made by people who grew up drinking them is actually supposed to taste like.
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Devoción
Devoción was founded in 2006 by Colombian-born Steven Sutton around a single, specific obsession: freshness. Sutton's argument is that roasting only accounts for half of what makes coffee taste good — the rest comes down to how recently the beans were harvested — so Devoción built its entire operation around controlling every step of that timeline itself, from selecting farms in Colombia through dry-milling at its own facility in Bogotá. That vertical control lets Devoción claim a genuinely unusual turnaround: coffee that goes from Colombian farm to Brooklyn cup in as little as ten days, compared to the months-long supply chains most roasters work with. The beans are flown rather than shipped by sea specifically to protect that freshness window, an added cost most coffee companies wouldn't bother with. The Williamsburg flagship matches that ambition with its physical space — a converted warehouse filled with live plants and skylights that's become one of the more photographed coffee shops in New York, closer to a greenhouse than a typical café. It's the kind of room built for lingering, not grabbing a cup and leaving. That combination of a genuinely distinct sourcing model and an equally distinct physical space has made Devoción a reference point for what direct-trade coffee can look like when a company commits fully to the idea instead of using it as a marketing line. Order a cup here and you're drinking coffee that was still on a tree in Colombia less than two weeks earlier.
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