Tim Wendelboe - Specialty Coffee Shop & Roaster in Oslo

Tim Wendelboe is a roastery, espresso bar and coffee training centre in Oslo. Tim Wendelboe started as a barista in Oslo in 1998, aged nineteen, at a small Oslo coffee chain with three stores, and by 2005 was its head of staff training and quality control. He won the Norwegian Barista Championship in 2001, 2002 and 2004, came second at the World Barista Championship in 2001 and 2002 and won it in 2004. In 2005 he also won the World Cup Tasters Championship. After a year as a freelance consultant and barista trainer, he opened the espresso bar in Grünerløkka on 30 June 2007.

The room was once a hair salon run by the woman who owned the building; her father, a mason, laid the stone façade in the 1890s, and two silhouettes of heads are carved into the stone at the entrance. Tim chose a side street on purpose, so that guests would arrive knowing roughly what the shop was about, and because the roaster ran inside the shop in the early years. From the first day the espresso bar has sold only coffee. The menu changes daily, milk and sugar are the only additions, and the bar works as a showroom for the roastery’s coffees, with a coffee tasting for guests who want one.

In 2018 the roastery moved a few blocks east to Tøyen, with a lab and training centre above it for the public and for professionals. It opens by appointment and for a coffee tasting and roastery tour that includes a cupping. Tim Wendelboe is known for light roasts and consistent quality, roasts to order every week and ships worldwide.

It buys green coffee directly from producers in Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador, visits them every year and makes public what it pays. Since 2019 it has farmed coffee itself at Finca El Suelo in Huila, Colombia. In November 2023 it set a goal that by 2034 all the coffee it buys should come from regenerative farming systems, and its TW Biological Project with Biofilia, a team based in Mexico, runs trials on six farms in Central and South America and on Finca El Suelo.