“Specialty coffee near me.” The search returns around thirty results in the center of Barcelona alone. In 10 years, the specialty coffee sector has grown at great speed and today roasting is being left behind to make way for the perfect espresso, the most aromatic filter. There is coffee tourism in Barcelona and meeting to have a good coffee in the city is an exceptional pleasure that few pass up.
Specialty coffee came to Spain through Barcelona at the hands of experts such as Kim Ossenblok, who was a barista for a while at Caffenation, in Belgium, more than 20 years ago. “At that time it was the only European coffee shop that used specialty coffee,” he explains. Previously, he had worked for 6 years in a Spanish multinational coffee company, traveling around the world to learn and also to train traditional coffee shops. But in 2010 everything changed: he participated in a Spanish coffee tasting championship where he placed third and that led him to compete again, in 2012, to win the national podium and third place in the world competition. “There I discovered specialty coffee, something that did not yet exist in Spain, and I decided to bet on it because it added much more value to the product: there were coffees with a multitude of different flavors and characteristics.”
Ossenblok set up a small cafeteria space inside another business, in El Poblenou. The year was 2013 and at that time, Marcos Bartolomé was doing the same in the design objects store Gray Street, in the heart of El Raval. Bartolomé thrived on coffee from Right Side, the only roaster from which since 2010 selected and carefully roasted beans came out. “I left the family business, Café de Finca, to open Right Side with one motivation: to be able to offer everyone the coffee that we only found in competitions,” explains Joaquín Parra, its founder. The idea took him far: from roasting precariously in the parking lot of his house to having his coffee used by Javier García in the national semifinal and in the world championship, where he achieved fourth place, the best classification Spain has ever obtained.
Parra was finally able to get a space to roast optimally in Castelldefels, a few kilometers from Barcelona, ??and he did so for two reasons: he is from here and he thought that the specialty coffee culture was going to catch on quickly. “It was obvious: the movement was developing in other cities such as London, Amsterdam or Paris, and it was clear that the next one was going to be Barcelona. Because it is a port city, it has a certain resemblance to Amsterdam (although we have nothing to do culturally with the Dutch).” He was right. Barcelona has become the coffee capital of Spain in certain ways. In the words of Ossenblok, who has been observing what happens here with coffee for more than 20 years, “it is where the most specialty coffee is consumed, where there are the most specialty coffee roasters, where there were the first trainers and coffee schools, where there are more baristas trained working in hospitality and it is also the port through which most of the specialty coffee from Spain and, probably, from Europe arrives. This characteristic is decisive, since accessibility directly influences the coffee culture of the region. The first trends are born here and tend to explode in Madrid, where there is even more movement and capital, and even a more active community as the Coffee Fest festival has recently demonstrated, which has managed to attract thousands of participants.”
For Jordi Mestre, founder of Nomad Coffee, who trained as a barista and roaster in England, it was also natural to return to his hometown to consolidate his business. “I had spent 7 years working in London and even set up my own coffee cart, and I wanted to come home. It was risky because there wasn’t a single coffee shop yet, only the Right Side roastery and the small Satan’s Coffee Corner space. I wanted to bring what I learned in England to Barcelona and make it grow, and it was evident to me that the city was in a good moment to become one of the great coffee hubs.”
The mix of large numbers of tourists, Spaniards who had worked abroad for a few years and were returning home, and foreigners who made Barcelona their new home meant that specialty coffee began to appear everywhere. The bells of gentrification have rung around the concept of specialty coffee and, however, this and no other is usually how global trends work: if something is not born here, someone brings it, and if the ideal breeding ground exists for it to prosper (in this case, a large volume of fixed or mobile population that is a consumer of the product), it does. “This has given Barcelona a very good time, with cafes opening every year and dozens of roasters starting their activity here. A new coffee culture has been generated in this city, in part thanks to the reception of foreigners, which amplifies all these opportunities,” says Ossenblok.
Parra explains it simply: “It is logical that in our first years there was greater consumption by foreign people. I call it the bikini effect in memory of what happened in the 70s, when the Swedes spent their summers on the Spanish coast and they wore bikinis to go to the beach. “Everyone started criticizing them but then, what happened is that the Spanish women also adopted the bikini.” In his opinion, specialty coffee came to Spain through Barcelona and today the city “hosts the most specialized and highest quality projects.” In terms of roasting, Barcelona’s power is significant: both Right Side and Nomad Coffee have clients all over the globe, from Marseille to Dubai, passing through Hong Kong, Vancouver and Taipei.
For Mestre, the local gastronomic culture is also added to these unique conditions. Although we were used to coffee that was too dark and intense, the truth is that we like to eat well. “We have an important gastronomic culture, with an important love for eating and drinking quality, and that customer is the one who has ended up being a consumer of specialty coffee.”
Mestre, who opened his first cafe and roastery in 2014, defends that Barcelona is a European capital of roasters and, of course, a Spanish capital of specialty coffee. However, he points out some weaknesses: “we are no longer number one in everything because, sometimes, we fail in the hospitality sector, where Madrid beats us thanks to its restaurant tradition, where a normal bar is a very good bar, which is “It means that the cafeterias are better set up and dispatched.” He also points out that in Madrid more coffee shops are being built with strong investments from Latin America, while there are a greater number of neighborhoods with higher purchasing power that allows for the loyalty of a clientele with a taste for specialty coffee. Similarly, Parra points out that despite the sweet moment that the sector is experiencing, the sense of community and sharing among ourselves the coffee and business knowledge that we are acquiring is being “forgotten. We lack time because most of us do not have large investments behind us, and also spaces to do it,” he says, lamenting the loss of the Independent Barcelona Coffee Festival.
The various waves of specialty coffee have also reached restaurants. Today we find it at the end of the meal and even some restaurateurs have chosen to open their own toasters. This is the case of Alejandro Balseiro, manager of the Hotel Restaurante Nito (Viveiro, Lugo), who has created his own roastery in order to be self-sufficient, called Urban Coffee Roasters, and also the cocktail bar Ginbo, Chapeau and his restaurant Sala de Personal ( Palma de Mallorca), which have opened the specialty cafeteria Menut on the same street. Matías Iriarte, its director, explains that the city was home to a cafeteria 10 years ago, La Molienda, where he tried good coffee for the first time. “When we could, we set up a specialty cafeteria to complete our offering, and we conceived the project as another version of liquid gastronomy.” Iriarte, who enjoys the island’s wide range of specialty coffee, recognizes that the Barcelona market has the largest and most diverse network of roasters and cafes than other Spanish cities.
