Contra Coffee + Tea

It’s no exaggeration to say that there are a thousand places in Orange County serving coffee and tea, a number that generally provides massive incentive to explore and little to be loyal to any given shop. Leveraging a combination of actual culinary experimentation and deft use of social media, Orange-based Contra Coffee & Tea has cracked the code on encouraging return visits, offering both stable and rotating collections of innovative non-alcoholic drinks, as well as flights – the opportunity to sample four at a time, in miniature glasses.

To be clear, the flights were what caught our attention and lured us in: Contra is the sort of place where you can sample espresso horchata, strawberry green tea, lychee rose black tea, and Vietnamese iced coffee before choosing one as a full-sized follow-up drink. But it’s also a place where you can stumble across something unique, such as a matcha and tonic or a Cactus Coolada, and just roll with it without a flight because it sounds interesting enough to drink no matter what. Contra also benefits from its Orange location, which is near multiple antique and thrift stores, as well as occasionally adjacent to or hosting local events.