Copenhagen Coffee Lab is a Danish-owned coffee chain with its own roastery, bakery and cafés. Of its four founders, two had always worked with coffee and built the roastery, and two are former master bakers, so the cafés are built around coffee, bread and cakes. Every bread and bun is made with sourdough and long fermentation. The interiors mix metal and brass, a light industrial laboratory style, and the name comes from the same idea: a coffee lab where the team experiments with every step, alternative roasts included.

The brand was born in Amager, where its roastery once stood. That room is now the flagship shop, a short walk from the beach, and the roasting has moved to Sydhavn. There the coffee is roasted and packed every day on a Loring S70 Peregrine, a convection roaster that recirculates its air and uses up to 80 per cent less fuel per batch than a traditional drum. Each coffee is profiled for its terroir, process and brew method, and every roast is checked for colour, cupped and tested as espresso. The coffees come mainly from Africa and Central America, bought with agents directly from the farmers, and part of the range is organic.

In Denmark there are cafés in Amager, Østerbro and Frederiksberg, and two at Copenhagen Airport. Abroad the chain has cafés in Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen and Duisburg, fourteen in Lisbon, where the first opened on Praça das Flores in 2017, and seven on the Côte d’Azur, from Cannes and Antibes to Nice.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Copenhagen Coffee Lab