Black Spring Coffee Company - Oakland

Black Spring Coffee Company is a coffee shop in Koreatown Northgate.

The space has high ceilings and huge windows, which make the shop feel large and sunny and open to the street. There are tables out front, and usually a water dish for dogs near the door. The shop displays work of local artists on the walls. The featured artist changes monthly.

Owner Ryan Stark lives nearby. An employee told me Mr. Stark wanted to open something in the neighborhood he lived in, so when the storefront came available it seemed a perfect match. He's passionate about low-acidity coffee; his favorite is Monsoon Medley, an Indian coffee roasted in Menlo Park.

This is a pretty new cafe and really the only cafe on this stretch of Telegraph. If the rule is that coffee shops are a sign of gentrification, well...

Also, this cafe is near the Commonwealth pub, itself the first "kind of fancy" bar in the area. I guess in this case the pub came first and then the coffee shop.

In 2015 Black Spring Coffee Company received the Best Wi-Fi Free Cafe from the East Bay Express. (Note- this does not mean there is free wifi, it means that there is NO wifi. see note:

BE AWARE: there is no wifi here

. If you're looking for wifi, here's a big page about that.