The Best Coffee in Chiang Mai: 6 Cafes and Tea Houses

The best coffee in Chiang Mai is at GRAPH Cafe in the Old Town for nitro cold brew, Omnia Cafe and Roastery for beans roasted on the premises, Impresso Espresso Bar for espresso, and Akha Ama for coffee grown by the family that sells it. For tea, Monsoon Tea and Raming Tea House Siam Celadon are the two worth planning around.

Northern Thailand is a coffee-growing region, and Chiang Mai sits a couple of hours’ drive from the farms. That is why the city has more cafes than anyone has counted, and why so many of them roast their own beans. It is also why the turnover is brutal: shops open and close inside a year, and half the cafe lists you will find online send you to a shuttered door. The six places below are the ones that have lasted, and each is here for a reason you can check rather than a photograph.

Best coffee in Chiang Mai

The best coffee in Chiang Mai comes from the cafes that roast their own beans, because roasting gives them control over the part of the process everyone else buys in. Four of them are listed below, in the order you would walk them starting from the Old Town.

Chiang Mai’s coffee scene is young by the standards of its temples and old by the standards of Thai speciality coffee. Akha Ama opened in 2010 and is treated locally as the founding shop; GRAPH followed in the Old Town in 2014. Everything since has had to be better than good to survive, which is the reason the survivors are worth your time.

Two things separate the cafes worth a detour from the ones that are only worth a photograph. The first is roasting on site. The second is a named source for the beans, which in Chiang Mai usually means a specific village in the hills north of the city rather than an importer.

1. Nitro Cold Brew at Graph Cafe

Graph Cafe is where to go for nitro cold brew, and the shop has been making it longer than anyone else in the city. GRAPH opened in the Chiang Mai Old Town in April 2014, launched its cold brew that June, and put nitro cold brew on the menu in September 2015. Since 2021 it has canned the stuff on its own line, steeping fresh grounds in cold or room-temperature water for up to 24 hours before infusing it with nitrogen.

The original Old Town shop is a small room on Ratvithi Road in Si Phum, open daily from morning to late afternoon. Nitro cold brew is the thing to order in a country that barely has a winter: it comes out cold, smooth and without the bitterness a hot brew leaves behind.

GRAPH has since grown into a group with branches across Chiang Mai, including One Nimman, Baankangwat and a roastery that supplies the rest. Order the same drink at any of them and it will have come off the same canning line.

2. Roasting and Brewing at Omnia Cafe Chiang Mai

Omnia Cafe and Roastery both roasts and brews, which is the shortest test of whether a Chiang Mai cafe is serious about coffee. A shop that roasts controls the whole process from green bean to cup, and it has to care enough to want that control in the first place.

Omnia sits in Chang Phueak, north of the Old Town moat and within walking distance of Tha Phae Gate. It is a small, air-conditioned room with limited seating and the roaster in view, and it is one of the cafes Chiang Mai’s remote workers use as an office. Go early if you want a table.

3. Impressive Espresso at Impresso Bar

Impresso Espresso Bar is the stop for espresso rather than the long American-style cups most Chiang Mai cafes pour. The shots are pulled short and strong, which is the point of the place.

The layout is the other reason to go. There is no standard service counter, so the baristas move around the room taking orders instead of calling you up to a bar. That makes it an easy place to sit with a laptop for an hour without feeling watched. Impresso is in the Sanambin Kao area, on the Old Airport Road side of town.

Read what other visitors say about Impresso Espresso Bar before you make the trip, because it sits further out than the other three.

4. Locally Sourced Coffee at Akha Ama Coffee Shop

Akha Ama Coffee sells coffee grown by the people who own the business, which no other cafe on this list can say. The social enterprise has run since 2010 and buys from a collective of more than 20 families in Maejantai, an Akha village in the mountains north of Chiang Mai. “Ama” means mother in Akha, after the founder’s own.

The founder is Ayu Chuepa, known as Lee, who grew up in Maejantai and set the business up after several years working for a Chiang Mai non-profit. Maejantai grows two arabica strains, Catuai and Typica, and the BBC reported that the coffee was picked from 2,500 entries by the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe for use in the World Cup Tasters Championship.

There are three Akha Ama shops in Chiang Mai. The Phrasingh branch on Ratchadamnoen Road, opposite Wat Phra Singh, opens daily and is the easiest to reach on foot. The original shop in Santitham and the Living Factory out towards Mae Rim both close on Wednesdays. Two more branches trade in Tokyo.

Lee also runs the Akha Ama Coffee Journey, which takes about 20 people up to Maejantai to pick coffee alongside the farmers, sleep in village homes and walk the 6.4 km (4.0 mi) dirt road to the plants at dawn. It runs in November and January and fills as soon as it is announced, so check the details on the Akha Ama coffee farm before you count on a place.

If the journey is full, a full-day coffee tour from Chiang Mai gets you to a working farm and back in a day.

What About the Tea?

Tea in Chiang Mai is a smaller scene than coffee, and the two places below are the ones that treat it as seriously as the cafes treat espresso. Northern Thailand grows tea as well as coffee, so both of them pour leaves from the same hills.

The tea houses that survive here have to be better than average for the same reason the cafes do. Several well-known ones have not survived: shops that guidebooks and older blog posts still list have quietly gone, and the tea scene is now concentrated in fewer, stronger hands.

5. Forest-grown tea at Monsoon Tea

Monsoon Tea sells tea grown among trees rather than on cleared plantation terraces, which it calls Forest Friendly Tea. The company works with growers in the forests of northern Thailand, keeps the tree cover standing and sells more than 100 teas made without pesticides or chemicals.

There are four Monsoon Tea branches in Chiang Mai. Wat Ket is the headquarters and the one to choose if you want the full range plus a tea house and restaurant. One Nimman is the busiest and the most central for most visitors. The other two are at JJ Market and Chiang Mai Gate. The company also runs tea workshops and tours if you want to see where the leaves come from.

6. Afternoon tea at Raming Tea House Siam Celadon

Raming Tea House Siam Celadon serves loose-leaf tea in a teak house on Tha Phae Road that was built in 1915. The tea house sits at the back of the Siam Celadon shop, so you walk through the ceramics to reach it, and there is a garden behind with outdoor seating.

Tea arrives in a pot with a sand timer so you can brew it for the right length of time, and the kitchen does light meals, scones and ice cream alongside. The Raming family have grown and processed tea in northern Thailand for generations, which is where the leaves come from. It opens in the morning and closes in the late afternoon, so it is an afternoon stop rather than an evening one.

If you want to take tea home, the night markets sell blended and loose tea by the bag, and the two tea houses above both sell their own leaves to take away.

Where to stay in Chiang Mai

Stay inside the Old Town moat if you want to walk to Akha Ama Phrasingh, GRAPH and Raming Tea House, and stay in Nimman if you would rather be near One Nimman and the newer cafes. The two areas are about 2 km (1.2 mi) apart, which is a short songthaew ride.

Hotels and guesthouses across every budget are listed on Booking.com’s Chiang Mai search, which covers both areas and the quieter riverside east of the Ping.

If an apartment suits you better than a hotel room, Vrbo has Chiang Mai apartments by the week, which works out cheaper than a hotel for a stay of more than a few nights.

How to get to Chiang Mai

Get to Chiang Mai from Bangkok by flying, by overnight train or by long-distance bus, in that order of speed. The flight takes a little over an hour, the sleeper train takes about 12 hours and the bus about 11.

The overnight train is the one worth choosing if you can. It leaves Bangkok in the evening, gets in the next morning and saves a night’s accommodation, and second-class air-conditioned sleeper berths sell out well ahead in the cool season. Trains, buses and ferries across Thailand can be booked in advance through 12Go.

If you would rather fly, compare flights to Chiang Mai across the Bangkok airlines that run the route, because fares move a long way between the low and high seasons.

Chiang Mai is one stop on a longer trip for most people. The Thailand travel guide covers the regions and the seasons, and the fun facts about Thailand page explains a few of the things that catch first-time visitors out, including why Chiang Mai’s temples have a dress code.

About the author. This guide is maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the original first-hand notes on the Chiang Mai cafes in this post come from Alex, who writes about coffee and travel at HomeGrounds. The team covers Thailand for independent travellers, including the cafes, tea houses, hotels and trains worth booking, and rechecks the places on this page because Chiang Mai’s cafes close as fast as they open.