Toledo has a quietly serious craft beer scene built around four or five solid local breweries — Maumee Bay, Black Frog, Patron Saints, Earnest Brew Works — plus the Warehouse District around Madison Avenue downtown which has worked itself into a small but real bar strip over the last decade. The student-and-grad bar scene clusters around the University of Toledo to the south.
For coffee, Plate 21 (downtown), Bleak House Coffee (Maumee), and the Toledo Museum of Art's cafe are the dependable choices. The Manhattan's Pub on Adams Street is the closest the city has to a writer's bar — dark wood, decent whiskey list, and the local literary regulars on Thursday nights.