It wasn’t until I started making matcha at home that I realized just how fun it can be. Truly, matcha prep has some ritual energy to it. It’s a little meditative, a little scientific, and a lot more approachable than it looks. Now it’s a daily moment I genuinely look forward to… and go to sleep thinking about!

If you’re even a little matcha-curious, this is your sign to try it at home.

Meet our new favorite drink to sip on: the Chantala Matcha. Going hand in hand with our pivot to unsweetened matcha, the Chantala Matcha combines our decadent, earthy matcha with a balanced vanilla syrup and our homemade blueberry-strawberry whipped cream, garnished with tangy freeze-dried raspberries. Trust me, it tastes and looks as good as it sounds.

“Every neighborhood needs a cafe,” Josh shares right off the bat. As the manager of Calibre Coffee, Josh along with the rest of the team, have made it a point to build something larger than just a location to grab a coffee to go. They saw the opportunity to create a place of connection for the surrounding community and have established themselves and continued to build on that very idea.

To better understand how our specialty menu came to life, we sat down with co-owner Joanna to talk through her process in creating each drink for our opening menu, the stories behind them, and what inspired them in the first place. Cheers!

Mastercol – Terra is our first fresh-crop coffee of the new year from Huila, Colombia, arriving after an exceptional run of standout Huila lots throughout 2025. It immediately caught our attention as a double-fermented, single-varietal Caturra from Mastercol—one of our most trusted producer groups and long-term partners since 2017. This is a coffee that feels both familiar and exciting, building on everything we love about the region while offering a renewed sense of vibrancy.

When you walk into Tala Coffee Roasters, there are three notorious features, just like the North Shore Roaster’s three café locations. Whether you’re in the renovated firehouse of Highwood, Libertyville Headquarters, or the revamped Winnetka gas station, Tala boasts a wide variety of drink offerings ranging from traditional coffee house wares to seasonal and specialty drinks.

Last Saturday, we threw our Ice Cream Social and Costume Party and had a great turnout! The cafe was buzzing all day, and our one-day-only affogato special was a huge hit, with espresso poured over Oberweis ice cream

The ~cosmos~ have spoken. Your destiny? Delicious. Gone are the days of circling your horoscope with a glitter gel pen and feeling known by the universe from a paragraph that told you to “embrace your sparkle”. Lucky for you, we’re bringing back that magic… coffee edition.

Tala Coffee Roasters, in addition to specialty coffee, often hosts a line of cyclists snaking their way through the cafe on weekdays and weekends–opting for more traditional fare like the single shot or Gibraltar. The history between Tala and the cycling community runs deep, extending back to when the Highwood cafe first opened its doors in 2018, and has expanded ever since.