Fresh Ground is a blog for global nomads and kindred cosmopolitans. Plan your own trip, or follow along with my guides to cafes and reviews of the world's best coffee in Asia, Europe, North America, and beyond.

Coffee Roasters
Searching for the Best Coffee in Stockholm - Part 2

Searching for the Best Coffee in Stockholm – Part 2

Here’s part two recapping my Easter visit to Stockholm (click here if you missed part one). As it turns out, most shops were closed during the Easter holiday, but we did manage to stop at Drop Coffee and Snickarbacken 7, while peeking in at a couple other places. Cupcake STHLM One place we popped in...
Emil Eriksson of Johan & Nyström, prepping for World Brewers Cup

Emil Eriksson of Johan & Nyström, prepping for World Brewers Cup

This marks the first year of the World Brewers Cup, a coffee competition similar to the World Barista Championship, though instead of espresso it’s focused solely on brewing coffee. The goal seems to be to do for manual brewing what the Barista Championships have done for espresso, pushing the leading edge of knowledge, technique, and...
Solde Kaffebar - Malmö, Sweden

Solde Kaffebar – Malmö, Sweden

This post is incredibly long overdue given that one of the first people to welcome me to Sweden was Dan Stenqvist, blogger, barista extraordinaire, and roaster for Solde Kaffebar in Malmö. It’s been about nine months since I arrived, and I think I’ve been to Solde more often than any other coffee bar in Malmö....
Brewing with Different Waters @ Lilla Kafferosteriet

Brewing with Different Waters @ Lilla Kafferosteriet

Lilla Kafferosteriet, a cafe and roastery in Malmö, hosts occasional cuppings on Sunday afternoons. I’m terrible at keeping up with the Swedish coffee scene (I don’t speak Swedish) and would never have known about these, but luckily Oscar from Portafilth.com keeps me in tune with where the coffee geek action is happening in Malmö. Last...
Coffee Collective - Copenhagen

Coffee Collective – Copenhagen

Coffee Collective is a world renowned Danish cafe and roastery, part-owned by 2006 World Barista Champion Klaus Thomsen, along with Peter Dupont, Casper Rasmussen, and Linus Törsäter. Their coffee is highly regarded and I’ve seen their bags proudly displayed like trophies behind the bar or in the back rooms of specialty cafes around the world....
Paul Bassett, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Paul Bassett, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Paul Bassett’s shop at Gosok Terminal in Seoul, Korea (article here), was one of my most frequented shops due to its consistently great espresso (though its convenient location didn’t hurt). They also have a shop in Tokyo that I had a chance to visit this past summer. It turns out that Paul Bassett’s Shinjuku cafe...
Cafe de l'Ambre: Old School Coffee in Tokyo, Japan

Cafe de l’Ambre: Old School Coffee in Tokyo, Japan

Cafe de l’Ambre is a quirky Tokyo legend, located a few zigzagging side-streets away from the main shopping area at Ginza. You may have seen it mentioned before when Australian barista champion Scott Callaghan wrote about his trip around the world here. The coffee bar and roastery has been around since the late 1940s and...
Vintage Danish Coffee Grinder

Vintage Danish Coffee Grinder

I walked into an antique shop next to my apartment here in Malmö and was surprised to see this giant vintage coffee grinder, apparently made in Denmark sometime in the 1920s and used at this location for almost as long. The woman who’d been working there for something like 20 years only spoke Swedish, so...
Belief Coffee in Seoul, Korea

Belief Coffee in Seoul, Korea

Belief is a relatively new cafe that I first visited many months ago in the Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul, Korea. When I stopped in the first time they were just setting things up, didn’t have an espresso machine installed, and were still apparently adjusting their roast profiles. I stopped in again a couple months ago...
La Caffe in Seoul, Korea

La Caffe in Seoul, Korea

La Caffe is a restaurant and cafe hidden away in the neighborhood near Wangsimni station. I heard that they had a Slayer espresso machine and made a point of visiting to see what all the fuss was about. You see, the Slayer is a rather rare espresso machine hand built in Seattle, noted in particular...
Lugo Coffee

Lugo Coffee

Lugo is a well appointed cafe in the huge Garden 5 shopping mall, complete with their own roaster in shop, La Cimbali and Ditting espresso set up, as well as kit for hand drip. Combining the two main Korean cafe trends, they offer all their coffees (around ~10 single origins) as either espresso shots or...
Choi Ga

Choi Ga

I’ve been keeping an eye out for good coffee on the northeast side of Seoul, but so far I’d only been able to find Star City’s Star Kitchen and Lotte Mall’s Cantata kiosk, which are above average, but nothing to go out of your way for. Then I came across a post at Jihye Chang’s...