Terraform Coffee Roasters was founded in Shanghai in 2019 and shares its roots with Blacksheep Espresso, which opened in 2017. It roasts at its own licensed food-production facility in Minhang District, in an old factory whose original structure and wall textures were kept. The production workshop sits on the ground floor as a self-contained box, and the floor above is a coffee space from which guests look down on the roasting; it hosts cuppings, open houses and workshops. A Loring S15 roasts the single-origin pour-over coffees, a Loring S70 the espresso beans and a UG22 the seasonal Blacksheep Series. Terraform was the 85th certified B Corp in mainland China.

Its coffee is poured at Blacksheep Espresso, which has two stores in Shanghai and, since 2025, one in Daikanyama, Tokyo. The same year Terraform worked with Jo Nagasaka’s Schemata Architects on a coffee space on a street corner in Shibuya. The team travels to growing regions every year, buys directly from estates and farmers and works with estates on custom micro-lots. It takes its coffees on cupping tours and to festivals abroad, from the London Coffee Festival to SCAJ in Tokyo.

Terraform loves “the clean elegance of washed coffee”, and the current shelf is all filter coffee: single lots from Ethiopia, many of them from Sidama and Guji, geishas from the Elida, Bambito and La Esmeralda estates in Panama, and coffees from Kenya, Rwanda, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru.

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Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Terraform Coffee Roasters