Denver café keeps drip at $3.50 while launching tenth city menu

Hot Shot Coffee occupies a 6,500-square-foot former dry cleaner at 3358 York Street in north Denver. The building had been vacant for 14 years before its new owners took it on, according to Westword's reporting at the opening.

The café opened on 1 May 2024. It is co-owned by the photographer Jeff Fierberg and Sky Armstrong.

Fierberg photographs restaurants for a living. The Michelin Guide has credited his photography of starred Colorado kitchens including Brutø, The Wolf's Tailor, Basta and MAKfam in its 2023 and 2024 articles.

The café runs on a simple structure. Every few months the specialty menu takes on a new city, with syrups made in house.

Nine menus have been listed on the site since May 2024, seven of them named for cities: Mexico City, Bangkok, Seoul, Copenhagen, London, Palermo and Savannah among them.

The tenth arrives on 18 October and is dedicated to Hokkaido. It introduces a miso brown butter latte, a cold brew topped with salted white chocolate foam, and a yubari melon tonic.

Specialty drinks on the Savannah menu ran at $7 to $8. Standard drip coffee is held at $3.50, which the company says is deliberate, so that long-term Clayton and Cole residents are not priced out of a seat.

Westword reported drip at $2 in the café's first summer. The Denver Post returned to the pricing question in December 2024.

There are 26 seats inside and 28 on a dog-friendly patio. The doors open at 7 a.m. and close at 1 p.m., seven days a week.

The back hall is part of Dry Clean Only, an event space in the same building that holds about 300 people standing. It hosts a free monthly mahjong meetup that draws 40 to 60 players, which the South China Morning Post covered in April 2026.

Ellow Bakery runs a pop-up in the room on 25 October.

Neither founder had worked in coffee before opening, as Westword reported in May 2024. Fierberg also runs his own projects alongside client work, including a year spent photographing markets that produced 19,000 photographs across eight markets, 51 of them exhibited.

The lesson for a founder is in the pricing split, not the photography. One line on the menu is held cheap to keep the room full and the regulars coming daily; the margin is made on a menu that changes every quarter and gives people a reason to come back.

Hot Shot sells the same cup to the same street every morning. Everything else rotates.

More: Hot Shot Coffee