Ultimo Coffee is owned by Aaron and Elizabeth Ultimo, who met working in a Washington DC coffee shop and moved to Philadelphia to open their own. The first café opened in the Newbold neighbourhood of South Philly in 2009, and it was, by its own account, “one of the first specialty coffee shops to open in Philadelphia”. A second followed in nearby Graduate Hospital in 2012, and in March 2019 a large café and bakery opened in the heart of Germantown. Eater has listed Ultimo among the 38 essential coffee shops in America and The Daily Meal once named it the number one coffee shop in the country.

In 2016 Ultimo Coffee Roasters grew out of the cafés, with a roastery and lab in Newbold where the team selects and roasts the coffees it likes best. Coffees are roasted to order and shipped on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or collected from one of the cafés. The coffees are mostly washed single origins from Ethiopia, Kenya, Guatemala and Mexico, with a decaf from Tolima. Imperial is the house answer to the dark roast, “fully developed” rather than black, built on La Danta, a coffee from a group of over 70 Guatemalan producers that Ultimo has bought for many years.

Ultimo also sells an instant coffee made with Swift Cup, weekly and monthly roaster’s-choice subscriptions and a 5 lb bulk subscription, and the Germantown bakery takes holiday pie pre-orders. A mug illustrated by the local artist and former Ultimo barista Lauren Fields marked the business’s thirteenth year.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Ultimo Coffee