Good Cup · 8 November 2026
The roaster chooses the coffee and decides how it tastes before the café ever opens the bag. Find a roaster you trust, then find the cafés that pour it.
A roaster buys green coffee, often from specific farms or auctions, and roasts it to bring out what that coffee can taste like. Two cafés with equally good baristas will serve different cups if one buys from a careful roaster and the other buys the cheapest blend. That is why 86 % of the cafés we rate Outstanding pour a roaster we rate Top or World-class, against 16 % of Entry Specialty cafés.
We rate roasters on four levels: World-class, Top, Rising and Local. Each roaster's page on Good Cup shows its level, the cafés that serve it and the farms it buys from where we know them.
There are two kinds of strong café. Some roast their own coffee: Nomad in Barcelona, Doubleshot in Prague, The Coffee Collective and Prolog in Copenhagen. Others bring in roasters from across Europe: Prufrock in London has served La Cabra, Koppi, Five Elephant and Drop, and Darcy's Kaffe in Copenhagen has served Dak, Friedhats, Prolog and Koppi.
To use this, open a roaster's page on Good Cup. It lists cafés that serve it, so a roaster you liked at home leads you to a café in a city you are visiting.
Be wary of a café that will not say whose coffee it uses. In our data, 38 % of Entry Specialty cafés name their roaster, against 89 % of Outstanding cafés.