The Ultimate Guide to Des Moines Coffee Shops

A couple blocks over on East Locust, Scenic Route Bakery does the pastry-and-coffee combo about as well as anyone downtown, pouring Tugboat coffee alongside croissants and a genuinely solid lunch menu. It’s the kind of place where the free Wi-Fi and the industrial-meets-cozy decor mean people camp out for hours, which can make the tables scarce at peak morning rush.

Vibrant Coffeehouse + Kitchen, also on East Grand, is the newer of the bunch, having opened in the East Village in 2023. It’s got the most retail-shop energy of the group — candles and books for sale up front — plus a rotating drink menu and dirty sodas if you want something with less espresso and more chaos.

Cross back over toward downtown proper and you hit a different register entirely. Northern Vessel, on Keosauqua Way, is small, minimalist, plant-heavy, and serious about single-origin coffee — it’s the closest thing DSM has to a coffee bar where the person behind the counter can talk you through where the beans came from without it feeling like a bit. It keeps banker’s hours, though: closed Sundays, done by early afternoon most days.

Inside the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Hobnob Coffee and Wine Bar splits the difference between coffee shop and evening spot — locally roasted coffee and breakfast in the morning, wine and small plates by night, with outlets built into the tables for anyone who wants to work through the transition. And a few blocks west, in the West End Artist District, Horizon Line Coffee roasts its own beans on-site — more on that below.

The Drake neighborhood — sometimes still called Dogtown by people who’ve lived here a while — has coffee shops that feel built for the rhythm of a college neighborhood: long hours, lots of outlets, and a steady mix of students and neighbors who’ve been coming for years. Mars Cafe, on University Avenue, is the anchor.

It’s been there long enough to be a fixture rather than a discovery, with a laid-back vibe and a menu that goes beyond straightforward espresso drinks.

A few blocks away on Hickman Road, Freedom Blend Coffee runs on a genuinely different model — it’s tied to a workforce-training nonprofit, and the shop itself has a fireside room, a patio, and event space that make it feel more like a gathering hall than a quick-stop counter.

And Friedrichs Coffee, with a location on University Avenue near Drake (plus a roastery and several other metro locations), is the old guard here — this is one of the most established local roasters in the city, and it shows in how dialed-in the drip coffee is.

This is also the part of town where you’ll see the most laptops out on a Tuesday morning, which makes sense — between Drake students, the hospital district nearby, and a neighborhood full of remote workers, the coffee shops here have had to get good at being a second office. Don’t expect much elbow room during finals week.

Historic Valley Junction has always been a walkable strip of small shops, and the coffee follows that pattern. Coffee Cats Cafe, on 5th Street, is the one people bring visitors to — it’s a coffee shop with an attached cat lounge stocked with adoptable cats from the Animal Rescue League of Iowa, so you can nurse a latte while a cat named something like Biscuit ignores you from a windowsill.

It’s genuinely good coffee, not just a gimmick with a counter attached.

A block or two away, Corazon Coffee Roasters does its own small-batch roasting on-site — organic, fair trade beans, loose-leaf teas, and a shop that keeps more limited hours (closed Sundays and Mondays), so plan around that if you’re making a special trip.

Out toward Jordan Creek, Smokey Row has two West Des Moines locations that do the reliable, all-day, breakfast-and-lunch-plus-coffee thing well if you need somewhere with a bigger footprint and a full menu.

Valley Junction rewards wandering more than most of the other neighborhoods on this list. It’s a compact, walkable strip of more than a hundred shops and restaurants, so even if your first stop is packed, you’re rarely more than a couple minutes from a second option — which matters on a Saturday morning when half the west metro seems to have the same idea.

Beaverdale’s coffee shops both lean hard into “neighborhood living room,” just in different eras. Grounds for Celebration, on Beaver Avenue, has a stone fireplace and love-seat seating that make it feel like the coffee shop equivalent of a favorite sweater — it’s been a community fixture for years, with seasonal drinks that get genuinely inventive (a blackberry lavender white mocha shows up most falls).

Down the street, Wake Up Iowa Coffee is the newer, retro-styled addition in the Lower Beaver stretch of the neighborhood, run by a husband-and-wife team.

The Ingersoll and Grand corridor — locally branded as “The Avenues” — has some of the most character-driven coffee in the city. Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventure has been roasting and serving on Ingersoll Avenue since 1993, which makes it one of the longest-running independent coffee spots in Des Moines.

It roasts its own beans, rotates local art on the walls every few weeks, and serves a steamed-egg breakfast that regulars order without looking at the menu.

A few blocks south on 28th Street, Chain & Spoke is exactly what it sounds like — half coffee shop, half bike shop, with espresso drinks and in-house baked goods served next to a service counter for your bike. It’s a strange and very DSM combination that works better than it has any right to.

None of this is a ranked list, and it shouldn’t be — the “best” coffee shop in Des Moines is almost always just the one closest to where you already are, the one where the person behind the counter knows your order before you say it.

If you’re new to the metro, my honest advice is to pick a shop in your own neighborhood first and let it become a habit before you go chasing the ones on this list. The rest is just a good excuse for a Saturday with nothing else on the calendar.

If you want more of this kind of neighborhood-level detail as we work through the rest of the city — where to eat, where to drink, which streets are worth an afternoon — subscribe to Des Moines Digest and it’ll land in your inbox as we publish it.