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Perhaps International Coffee Day is a good time to ask why hotel coffee – that thin brown liquid that comes in silver jugs – is still so poor. Never mind the third wave coffee movement, some hotels are still stuck in the first wave. But things are changing as more hotels collaborate with either stand-alone coffee shops or small chains that roast their own coffee.One of the first New York hotels to embrace third wave coffee was Ace Hotel  which began a collaboration with a Portland-based coffee roaster and retailer called Stumptown back in 2009. There are now Stumptown Cafés in several Ace Hotels in the US while the lobby café at the Ace Hotel in London’s Shoreditch serves coffee by Square Mile, an award-winning coffee roasting company based in East London.You’d expect London hotels to be all over third wave coffee and so they are with plenty of artisan roasteries to choose from. One of my favourite examples is The Dorchester’s Parcafé  on Park Lane. Its delicious coffee is produced by a company called Alchemy which hand-roasts small batches of coffee at its roastery in South West London. In Barcelona, a great hotel for coffee-lovers is Casa Bonay  which says good coffee is one of the things it stands for. Its coffee shop is overseen by Marcos Bartholomé, owner of Barcelona’s Satan’s Coffee Corner which works with a small independent coffee roastery called Right Side.Hotel coffee is still not so great in Scotland. In Edinburgh the caffeine-lover’s best bet is an aparthotel called Eden Locke, in George Street, which boasts a third wave coffee lounge serving brews by a company called Fortitude which produces single origin speciality coffee roasted in Edinburgh.

Otherwise, my tip for getting a (slightly better) cup of coffee in a hotel is to order a machine-made brew: anything to avoid the dreaded silver jug.

BY MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN