Coffee Libre was founded in 2009 by Pil Hoon Seu, by his own account Korea’s first Q Grader, and is one of the first generation of Korean specialty coffee companies. It works across the chain: it imports and sells green coffee, roasts, and sells roasted coffee retail and wholesale. Its team spends more than 90 days a year at origin, cups over 1,000 samples a year and buys coffees that score 83 points or more. The idea behind it is “coffee with faces” (얼굴 있는 커피): the producers, pickers, processors, traders and baristas behind each cup. Its blue wrestling mask comes from the film Nacho Libre, whose hero wrestles at night to fund an orphanage and keeps climbing back into the ring after every beating.

In 2014 Coffee Libre bought Finca Libre, a farm in Mozonte, Nicaragua, where it trials varieties, planting, fertilising, fermentation and processing, and runs free field training for local growers. Since 2016 its Geisha project has supported smallholders in Nicaragua, Honduras and Colombia with around a million Geisha trees. It became a Certified B Corporation in March 2025. It has brought out fourteen books on coffee and translates World Coffee Research reports into Korean as the organisation’s Korean partner.

Coffee Libre has four cafés in Seoul. In Yeonnam-dong there are the Yeonnam café, which holds free public cuppings, and Paran, in the company’s own building, which also hosts cuppings. The other two are in the 1898 Plaza at Myeongdong Cathedral and in Times Square in Yeongdeungpo.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Coffee Libre