Mazelab is the project of Jackie and Thu, life partners who met over a cup of coffee. Jackie’s story starts in design: on the way to a creative career in San Francisco, a period of travel and landscape photography in Iceland led to the idea of a place where coffee and photography could live together. That idea became a first café, and after six years in specialty coffee, Mazelab’s roasting began in May 2023.

The roastery in Prague 6 is a coffee lab and “a creative playground”, with public opening hours. Mazelab chooses lots for clarity, sweetness and complexity rather than for fashionable names, and roasts each one to the point where its character shows most clearly, without a fixed light or dark style. Mazelab buys as a coffee collector rather than by catalogue: sometimes a very small lot, sometimes a return to a familiar producer whose new harvest stands out.

Mazelab’s own cafés are Pleiku in Libeň and May Cafe in Vinohrady. Pleiku is a more intimate space with brunch and a coffee gallery built around design and origin. May Cafe is the living room of the house, with hand brews and small brunches.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Mazelab Coffee