Father Carpenter, Berlin

Father Carpenter is a Berlin-based breakfast and lunch restaurant and coffee roasting company. It was founded in early 2015 and grew from a small hospitality project into a larger café operation, added roasting as a separate but integrated activity, and opened and later closed further concepts along the way. It now runs a smaller number of operations with higher consistency. The company is Father Carpenter GmbH, with Kresten Thogersen as managing director.

The restaurant is in Mitte, with table service and outdoor seating. Reservations are taken for one to seven people and half the room is kept for walk-ins; the outdoor tables are walk-in only. A private dining room seats up to 24 and the café up to 30 for events, and the team runs coffee workshops, a home barista course and a roasting basics course.

The coffee is roasted in-house for the restaurant and for wholesale customers, cafés, restaurants and offices. Its approach is romantic and puritan: it roasts light, wants coffee that is bright, sweet and clean, and holds that each green coffee has an intrinsic peak flavour that roasting should make soluble without adding flavours of its own. The range is split into filter roasts and espresso roasts, often the same lot in both, from Kenya, Ethiopia and Peru, with a Masterpieces line of limited lots from Incahuasi in Cusco. The current retail range is listed below with the roaster’s own tasting notes.