Let’s not drag this out. Sparkroot is a five hipster kind of place. It serves iced slow-brew coffee with chicory in mason jars alongside a vegetarian food menu that features granola and sweet potato tacos. It attaches the bathroom keys to bike handlebars. It’s always air-conditioned to about 60 degrees to accommodate the hipster habit of wearing flannel in the desert.

It’s hip as hell.

It’s also a great place.

Sparkroot shares a corner at the intersection of Congress Street and Fifth Avenue with Hotel Congress, the Hub and Proper. It’s a hip neighborhood and Sparkroot more than pulls its own weight.

The downtown location means the clientele skews a little more towards the young-professionals-who-wear-suspenders-to-work crowd than the tattooed-grad-student type — though we all know there are sick tats hidden under those shirtsleeves — but it’s still a decent place to get some homework done. The upstairs balcony is ideal for taking a drink and a laptop and writing about the lives of the people passing below. Even at night, when the wine and beer sales pick up, Sparkroot is rarely a loud place.

That slow-brew iced coffee with chicory, called a NOLA, is my personal favorite, but its rotating iced teas and lemonade are also a great way to slake your thirst. In colder months, the mocha is impossibly good.

It’s not particularly cozy. It’s all metal and glass, but if that’s your mason jar of tea, it’s not bad.

And the cavernous, sparsely-furnished space is plenty big enough for five hipsters and their coffees. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

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