>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.

Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.