Kaffa
Kaffa is a coffee roastery and coffee retailer in Oslo, Norway. Norway’s official business register files it as KAFFA AS, established on 30 June 2005, under the industry code for processing of tea and coffee, with 10 employees and a business address at Enebakkveien 117, 0680 Oslo.1
It appears in this wiki for one concrete reason: at the 2011 Nordic Roaster competition in Copenhagen, Kaffa finished third overall out of ten roasteries.2
Before anything else, a name warning, because three unrelated things in coffee are called Kaffa.
| ”Kaffa” | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Kaffa (this note) | An Oslo roastery and equipment shop, registered 20051 |
| Kaffa / Kefa | A forest region in southwestern Ethiopia, routinely named as the birthplace of wild arabica |
| Simple Kaffa | A Taipei roastery and café group built around Berg Wu’s 2016 World Barista Championship win |
The Oslo company and the Taipei company are not related, and neither is the Ethiopian region — the region is simply a name both businesses could have borrowed.
The company on paper
Everything in this table comes from the Brønnøysund Register Centre, Norway’s official business register, which is the primary record for any Norwegian company.1
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Registered name | KAFFA AS |
| Organisation number | 988 649 295 |
| Legal form | Aksjeselskap (AS) — Norwegian limited company |
| Established | 30 June 2005 |
| Entered on the Entity Register | 20 October 2005 |
| Industry code | 10.830 — processing of tea and coffee |
| Business address | Enebakkveien 117, 0680 Oslo (Ryen) |
| Employees | 10 |
| Share capital | NOK 200,000 |
The register also records the company’s stated purpose, which is unusually descriptive of what a modern specialty roastery does: owning and letting property, retail trade in coffee, running courses, and spreading knowledge about coffee over the internet.1 A roastery that writes teaching and publishing into its articles of association is telling you something about how it intends to sell.
One detail is worth a second look. Solberg & Hansen — Norway’s oldest and largest specialty roastery — is registered at Enebakkveien 125, the same street in the Ryen district, a few numbers away.1 Two of Norway’s better-known roasteries are effectively neighbours.
2011 Nordic Roaster
The Nordic Roaster competition works by giving several Nordic roasteries the same brief and letting the entire conference audience score the results blind — in 2011, 170 attendees voting on ballot slips across an espresso round and a filter round. The full format is explained on that note.
Kaffa’s 2011 numbers, from the organisers’ own results post:2
| Round | Votes | Place | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Filter | 31 | 3rd |
| 2 | Espresso | 11 | 8th |
| 3 | Overall | 42 | 3rd |
The top of the table that year was Solberg & Hansen on 57 votes and Tim Wendelboe on 56, with Kaffa fifteen votes behind in third.2 The rest of the ten-roaster field was Johan & Nyström (Sweden, 38), Doubleshot (Czech Republic, 34), Koffein (Russia, 29), Kontra Coffee (Denmark, 23), Coffee Libre (Korea, 22), Coffee Lab (Brazil, 12) and Löfbergs Lila (Sweden, 3).2
Kaffa’s filter entry is the interesting part. It was a Geisha from Mama Cata in Panama, natural processed, and the organisers recorded the room’s notes as “ripe fruit, strawberry, peach, berries, sweet aftertaste, clean.”2 In 2011 that was an aggressive choice — a Panamanian natural Geisha was still an expensive, showy coffee, and Kaffa spent it on the round it went on to place third in while finishing near the bottom in espresso. The split says the house was strong on light filter roasting and weaker under pressure, which is the same profile the Oslo scene as a whole is known for. See Third wave coffee and Coffee roasting for that style, and Green coffee buying for why the choice of green matters as much as the roast.
To verify
When Kaffa actually started roasting. The register date of 30 June 2005 is the date the limited company KAFFA AS was established1 — not necessarily the date a roastery called Kaffa began trading. Norwegian businesses routinely reorganise into a new legal entity long after they open. No company history, founder name or ownership record was confirmed here, and the company’s own site could not be read (see below). Do not write “founded 2005” as the roastery’s founding date without a second source.
To verify
The official website could not be loaded here. Repeated attempts to fetch kaffa.no returned HTTP 429 (rate-limited), so nothing on the company’s own site was read directly. The domain is nonetheless matched to this company: a search listing of the site’s own contact page gives Enebakkveien 117, N-0680 Oslo, the same address as the register entry.13 The same listing shows the site claiming “Norway’s largest selection of brewing equipment for coffee and tea”3 — that is the company’s own marketing wording, seen only as a search snippet, and it is not verified.
To verify
Whether Kaffa competed in any other Nordic Roaster edition. 2011 is the only year in which the Nordic Roaster note’s results table records Kaffa at all, and the organisers publish several other years’ placings as unreadable score-sheet images. Kaffa’s absence from other years is an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
To verify
Nothing here is sourced to a competition or auction record beyond 2011. No cupping score, auction purchase, Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama buyer listing, certification or award for Kaffa was found in anything consulted. The research report behind this note returned material about the Ethiopian Kaffa region rather than the Oslo company — geology, wild arabica populations and the Kaldi legend — none of which is a fact about this roastery, and all of which belongs on Ethiopia instead.
Related
- Nordic Roaster — the competition Kaffa placed third in, and where its only verified result sits
- Solberg & Hansen — the 2011 winner, and its neighbour on Enebakkveien
- Tim Wendelboe · Nordic Approach — the rest of the Oslo light-roast world it belongs to
- Simple Kaffa — the unrelated Taipei roastery with a confusingly similar name
- Mama Cata · Geisha · Natural process · Panama — the coffee it took to the 2011 filter round
- Coffee roasting · Cupping · Coffee scoring — what a roasting competition is actually measuring
- Green coffee buying · Third wave coffee — the buying culture and the roast style behind the result
- Ethiopia — the region the name points at
Official links
Footnotes
-
Brønnøysund Register Centre — Enhetsregisteret entry for KAFFA AS, org. no. 988 649 295 — Norway’s official business register, queried directly and confirmed via WebFetch; source of the registered name, organisation number, legal form, 30 June 2005 establishment date, 20 October 2005 register entry, industry code 10.830, Enebakkveien 117 address, 10 employees, NOK 200,000 share capital and the stated company purpose. The same register is the source for Solberg & Hansen’s Enebakkveien 125 address ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7
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Nordic Barista Cup — Nordic Roaster Competition 2011: The Winner — the competition organisers’ own results post; confirmed via WebFetch; source of Kaffa’s third place and 42 overall votes, its 31 filter votes and 11 espresso votes, the full ten-roaster field with countries and vote counts, and the Mama Cata Geisha natural filter entry with its recorded tasting notes ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
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Kaffa — contact page, kaffa.no — the company’s own contact page. It could not be fetched directly (HTTP 429); its address line and the site’s brewing-equipment claim were read only from a search-result listing, which is why both are flagged above rather than stated as fact ↩ ↩2