Best Coffee in Unawatuna

April 10, 2025

Many places in Sri Lanka make claim to great coffee but very few reach a decent standard and manage to maintain it! Getting it right means daily tasting (merrily conducted by yours truly), adjustments for weather, constant training (of us and our baristas!), and working really closely with suppliers.

Sourcing great beans

Down on the south coast its hard to get consistent supply of anything for a cafe so sourcing beans can be tough. The best coffee shops look for suppliers who offer weekly deliveries (to ensure beans are as fresh as possible) as well as consistent quality.

Before we were the land of tea, Sri Lanka was actually a worlds leading producer of coffee!! So we know we have the land and climate for it. Slowly slowly farmers are switching back to beans and we are seeing more and more small batch artisan growers on the scene. We have had several local roasters now for quite some time and its great to see them experimenting with blends and starting to offer locally grown. Its a young market so locally grown wont always mean good quality as we learn the route to the best bean but its great to see enthusiasm and competition start to raise the standard in crop and roasters.

Here at Wild & the Sage we use Temple Grounds, a local roaster who have some great imported beans as well as some nice blends from local small farms

Perhaps controversially, we use a medium roast for our espresso based coffees but a slightly darker roast for the french press and v60. Thats just our preference and we have found people agree!

The making of a barista

Next challenge in our little village on the south coast is finding baristas! While Sri Lankans are some of the most hospitable people in the world, most of our residents dont drink in coffee shops and we have not yet adopted the coffee culture found in Colombo or bigger cities so very few could prep you a coffee beyond than Nescafe 3-in-1…

Added to that hospitality has a high staff turnover is a massively undervalued industry. This means serious coffee shops need to invest in constant training. Many start off right with good training but then often try and save by getting staff to cross train and slowly we see quality slip. We often see untrained waiters running coffee machines when their baristas are off resulting in inconsistency.

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Best Coffee Spots in Una

Fear not! There are a few of us doing it well. Here are our “go-to” coffee spots in Una for consistently decent coffee that meet any international standard