Five Elephant opened its first café in December 2010 on a quiet dead-end street in Kreuzberg, when terms like direct trade and terroir had not yet entered common use. The two founders roasted in the back, baked the cakes from scratch and built a drip bar from Hario V60s and welded copper pipes. Filter coffee was how they chose to show origin, process and variety. The cheesecake, made to a recipe one founder’s mother emailed in 2011, is still the soul of the café, and whole cheesecakes can be ordered online for collection in Kreuzberg.

The roastery and bakery now sit in another Kreuzberg backyard. Five Elephant roasts on Mondays and Thursdays and sources by direct trade: it pays on average more than twice what Fair Trade exporters pay and buys from the same producers year after year. The subscription sends two filter coffees and two espressos each month.

In 2025 a leak under the bar forced a rebuild of the Kreuzberg café. The company opened a former staff room to guests, installed an aluminium bar topped with a slab of Zimbabwean granite, brought back the hanging lamps from its closed KaDeWe café and built a dedicated hand-brew corner, returning to the filter focus it opened with. The 1960s schoolroom world maps stayed on the walls. The shops have no wi-fi; laptops are allowed at designated tables in Kreuzberg on weekdays.

There are four more cafés: one in Mitte, two in Prenzlauer Berg and one inside the Neue Nationalgalerie. Five Elephant also hosts the German AeroPress Championship each year, in 2026 with a Berlin regional and a final in Munich. The current retail range is listed below with the roaster’s own tasting notes.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Five Elephant