The 19grams Story

  • Back to the beginning

    Opening a specialty coffee roastery under the name of Tres Cabezas in Friedrichshain in 2002 takes a whole load of conviction, passion, and persistence. Back then, specialty coffee was only just breaking out in the US, Australia or the UK, and certainly hadn’t made its way to Berlin yet.

    We gave it our best shot anyway, and we were sure of one thing the whole way through: the coffee being served in restaurants, bars and cafés back then just wasn’t our thing. The quality was poor, sure, but we also weren’t satisfied with the way it was traded, produced and processed. We wanted to change that.

  • What we want to change

    First and foremost, it's about finding our way back to this fascinating raw material - the coffee cherry - which ripens under very special conditions on a bush into a fruit which makes so many great things possible. Heading back to the roots, we first had to learn: about cultivation, harvesting, and processing, about varieties and soil conditions, and about the possibilities of buying speciality coffees and bringing them to us in Berlin.

  • We see no borders

    We travelled, talked to people, crawled around in the dirt, planted, harvested and tried to sell coffee from our own farm. In the process, we got a little better each time, understanding a little more about what distinguishes good coffee from bad coffee. We made friends in farmers who share our vision of good coffee. We are lucky to be supplied from all over the world - Costa Rica, Colombia, Panama, Brazil, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, Indonesia and China. Because coffee is also a seasonal product, it’s key to follow the harvest cycles around the globe to maintain high quality.

  • Our growth

    We’ve always been an open company that shares our knowledge, and in return we’ve grown through the people who've joined us from all over the world. We’ve taken influences and expertise and incorporated them into our style, but most importantly into the roasts. The result is the massive selection of filter coffees and espresso roasts that you can taste with us today. Our name changed with the times too: Tres Cabezas became 19grams thanks to our colleagues from Australia, where double espressos are brewed with 19 grams of ground coffee.

Our Passion

We have watched the growth of specialty coffee with big smiles on our faces, and you can buy coffee from us with complete confidence. We have a world of partners from across the globe who supply us with the product we all love so much. The industry is an exciting place to be as more and more people become interested coffee, and we love being in the middle of the movement spreading awareness that coffee can be so much more than a cheap bag from the supermarket. We put our producers front and centre, travelling to visit our farmers regularly, talking, understanding and discussing. We strive for real sustainability in production and we make bloody good coffee. We are not ideological. We welcome questions, suggestions and criticism! Because it’s important to get a little better every single day.