A visit to Napa Valley in California means wineries; head to Kentucky and you can't miss the bourbon and barbecue.

Although it's still in its infancy compared to other branches of food-inspired travel, coffee is starting to attract tourists. People snap pictures of the original Peet's store on Fourth Street in Berkeley, Calif., and the $20,000 siphon bar at Blue Bottle in San Francisco. Companies in Seattle (ground zero of coffee tourism) offer walking tours of the town's coffee history or "crawls" from cafe to cafe.

Coffee should also be on the list of reasons to visit and explore Pittsburgh. The Steel City has a rich history, which includes a significant role in the development of the specialty coffee industry. No one offers a tour of Pittsburgh coffee, so let's take a virtual one, starting with a company whose name was once synonymous with coffee around the country.

In 1859, John and Charles Arbuckle opened McDonald and Arbuckle, a wholesale grocery business, in Downtown Pittsburgh. At the time, most Americans bought their coffee green and roasted it themselves in low-tech contraptions that inevitably resulted in at least a few burnt beans. Arbuckle Brothers, as it was eventually known, cornered the market on pre-roasted, bagged coffee.

Eventually the company grew so large that it moved the offices to New York, but it had already made a lasting mark on the way Pittsburghers (and most of the country) bought their coffee. They wanted someone else to roast it.

Many local roasters filled the void that Arbuckle's left, at least in the Pittsburgh market, but it wasn't until 1919 that another roaster opened that would have a lasting presence -- Nicholas Coffee.

Nicholas Constantine Nicholas founded the company in a spot that is now 4 PPG Place. A gourmet roaster, he selected only the highest grade beans from origins producing the best-tasting coffees, then carefully roasted them each day to ensure maximum freshness for the customer. He handed the business down to his son, Gus, who in 1957 moved the roaster to its current location in Market Square. Gus Nicholas, who passed away last week, handed the store over to his son, Nick Nicholas, in the late '70s.

Over the years, Nicholas Coffee competed with other local roasters to maintain its share of the market, but they all had to deal with the growing presence of large companies that sold cheap, low-quality coffee at grocery stores. This coffee was typically roasted long before it arrived on shelves, used a high percentage of cheaper robusta beans and relied on the power of advertising and underpricing to attract customers.

When John Prestogeorge opened a coffee roaster in the Strip District in 1950, "people bought store-bought coffee, Maxwell House, Folgers, that kind of thing," he recalled. He'd already been involved in the coffee business, and he wanted to start a gourmet shop and "roast the coffee every day fresh."

In those days, there were still coffee brokers in Pittsburgh -- the people who bought green beans at origin and sold them to roasters, the same way the vast majority of roasters acquire their beans today.

One way for gourmet roasters like Prestogeorge or Nicholas to distinguish themselves was to create proprietary blends of beans, not to hide the defects of cheap beans, but to create a coffee that could have the same flavor profile season after season. It took Prestogeorge months to create the J.P. Hearty Blend, as he carefully brewed and tested different blends of coffee, but he was so successful that it is still one of the store's most popular types of coffee.

Meanwhile, Gus Nicholas had remained active in the coffee world. In the early '80s he was one of the founding members of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a place where coffee professionals could share information and set standards for specialty coffee.

Around the same time, Dee and Rich Cefola decided to buy Dee's father's coffee company, Fortunes Coffee Roastery. Although the company was headquartered in Pittsburgh, and some specialty coffees were roasted in the Strip District shop, the majority of the coffee was roasted in New York and only packaged here.

But in the '80s and early '90s, specialty coffee began to grow, encouraging roasters to expand production and cafes to open in new locations. In 1992, the Cefolas decided to bring the roasting operation home.

Today, they've just completed a new $1 million roasting facility in Stowe, one that will allow them to roast not only more coffee each year, but also will improve the quality of the finished product.

"The new roasting plant can bring out better nuances in flavor because it controls the roast so much better than older roasters," explained Rich Cefola. "We've always had a reputation for excellent coffee, but now we can even take the next step."

The Cefolas' new roaster is also a tribute to Pittsburgh sports teams -- the space is decked out in black and gold.

Fortunes Coffee Roastery's expansion isn't the only sign that Pittsburgh is still a thriving center of the specialty coffee industry. There are more than a half dozen roasters in the greater Pittsburgh area, dozens of independent cafes, and local sources for most of the country's nationally acclaimed specialty roasters. This year, three young coffee professionals created a Pittsburgh Area Coffee Association, which has helped plan and publicize local coffee-related events.

And Nicholas Coffee, coming up on its 90th birthday, is still going strong, a thriving business and a bit of a museum all in one. Coffee is scooped from the same bins they've used since 1919, only now they contain "almond joy" and "butterscotch creme" flavored coffees along with Guatemalan Antiguan and Hawaiian Kona. A 100-year-old coffee roaster stands near the front of the shop, which came from a customer who couldn't pay his debt. The store's espresso bar is a much newer addition, but Nick Nicholas plans to expand it and add seating some time this year.

And some things never change -- the roast works are still visible at the back of the shop, and every day Market Square is filled with the aroma of freshly roasted coffee.