Specialty Coffee Wiki

La Cabra

Properties3
descriptionThe Aarhus roaster-and-bakery that took Nordic light roasting global — one roast profile per coffee, no separate espresso version, cafés from Copenhagen to Muscat, and the winning bid on Peru's 2025 Cup of Excellence.
tagsorganization, roaster, cafe, bakery, denmark, aarhus, light-roast, nordic
aliasesLa Cabra Coffee, La Cabra Coffee Roasters

8 min read

La Cabra

La Cabra is a Danish specialty coffee roaster, café group and bakery. It was established in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2012, and started roasting its own coffee in 2013.1 It calls itself “a modern coffee company,” and today serves wholesale partners and home subscribers in more than 60 countries.1

Why it belongs in this wiki: La Cabra is the clearest working example of the Nordic roasting position — roast the coffee as lightly as it will take, name the farm, and let the origin do the talking. It is also one of the small number of European roasters that shows up as the winning name on official auction sheets, most recently as the buyer of the top lot of the 2025 Cup of Excellence Perú at $80.10/lb.2

The company

AttributeDetail
Founded2012, Aarhus, Denmark; roasting from 20131
Home cityAarhus, with a later roastery in Copenhagen1
BusinessRoastery, café group, bakery, wholesale and home subscription1
ReachSubscribers and wholesale partners in 60+ countries1
House styleLight, clarity-driven roasting; one roast profile per coffee1
SourcingDirect with producers plus selected importers; repeat visits to origin each year1

One roast, not two

Most roasters release a coffee twice — a lighter filter roast and a darker espresso roast of the same beans. La Cabra does not. It decides at the cupping table which single roast “best showcases the character of a specific coffee,” and sells only that one, whatever you plan to brew it in.1

That is a real commitment rather than a marketing line. Espresso is brewed at high pressure through a dense bed of grounds, which exaggerates acidity and any underdeveloped, grassy character; roasting a touch darker for espresso is the standard way to tame it. Refusing to do that means every coffee has to survive both brewers on one profile — and it pushes the burden back onto green buying, exactly as it does at Sey Coffee. See Light roasting and Espresso.

Sourcing

La Cabra buys directly from producers and through selected importing companies, and says it travels to origin countries several times a year.1 What it says it is looking for is narrow and specific: “clean and bright cups, with clear flavour notes that reflect their place of origin.”1

A third-party guide to Nordic roasters describes the same practice from the outside — “long-term work with producers, a preference for classic processing,” aiming to reveal “variety and place rather than adding roast character,” with a restrained approach to experimental methods.3 That last point is worth flagging: at a moment when much of specialty coffee competes on ever more elaborate anaerobic and co-fermented lots, La Cabra’s public position is mostly washed and mostly conventional. Recent Colombian offers listed against the company include Luis Edgar Camacho’s Pink Bourbon from Huila, washed and natural lots from Café Granja La Esperanza in Valle del Cauca, and Alto Naranjal from Nariño.3

Where you can drink it

La Cabra runs cafés and bakeries on four separate footprints, all listed on its own locations page.4

CountrySites
DenmarkGraven (Graven 20) · Kampanilen (Irma Pedersens Gade 120) · Borggade Bakery (Borggade 4F), all Aarhus; Møntergade (Møntergade 3A) and Nordhavn (Århusgade 118X), Copenhagen
United StatesSoHo (284 Lafayette St) and East Village Bakery (152 2nd Ave), Manhattan; Bushwick Roastery (1329 Willoughby Ave), Brooklyn
OmanAl Qurum Bakery and Shatti, both Muscat
ThailandTalad Noi (813 Charoen Krung Rd) and Silom, Bangkok

Two details in that table are more interesting than a street address. The Bushwick roastery puts La Cabra’s American roasting a few blocks from Sey Coffee, in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood that became the centre of American light roasting. And the bakery side is not an afterthought: La Cabra runs dedicated bakery sites in Aarhus, New York and Muscat, and won a design award for the pastry programme (below).

Buying at auction: Perú 2025

The one fully documented, publicly verifiable purchase in La Cabra’s record is a Cup of Excellence lot.

At the 2025 Cup of Excellence Perú auction, La Cabra Coffee was the winning bidder on the first-ranked lot — La Catarata, grown by Angel Antonio Manosalva Palomino in Cajamarca, a washed Geisha scoring 90.64, sold at **80.10 per pound**.[^2] The full auction moved 18,571 lb for 495,380 across 30 lots, so La Cabra paid roughly three times the sale’s weighted average of $26.66/lb to take the top coffee.2

For context on why an outstanding Peruvian coffee still fetches 80 while a comparably scored Ethiopian lot has gone for 445, see Premiumisation and Cup of Excellence records by country.

Visiting Carmen Estate, April 2024

La Cabra publishes farm-visit write-ups, and one of them is load-bearing elsewhere in this wiki. In April 2024 the company visited Carmen Estate on the western slopes of the Barú volcano in Panama, and bought a washed Caturra lot from the farm’s oldest trees — planted at the estate’s founding in 1960 and now over sixty years old, at heights reaching above 2,200 m.5 La Cabra’s tasting note for it is “deep molasses sweetness balanced by fresh and juicy lemon,” and it describes the farm as managing insects without pesticides and its soil without chemical fertilisers or herbicides.5

That page is also the source most directly stating that Jean Paul Langenstein, a former roaster, runs Carmen Estate as farm manager — a point that conflicts with importer descriptions of Carlos Aguilera Franceschi as managing director, and which is flagged on all three of those notes rather than settled here.5

Recognition

La Cabra won Outstanding Design Achievement: Pastry in the 2024–25 Sprudge Design Awards, a public-ballot award run by the coffee publication Sprudge. It was the only Danish winner in that cycle.

That is a media award rather than a measured coffee result, and it should be read as such. Beyond it, no competition placement — barista, brewers cup or roasting — is documented for La Cabra in anything consulted for this note.

To verify — who founded and who owns La Cabra

La Cabra’s own About page, read directly for this note, gives the founding year and city but names no founder, owner or executive.1 The research report behind this note observes that industry profiles commonly associate Esben Piper with the company as founder or creative director, but states plainly that this is not supported by the primary pages it consulted. The Nordic Style Coffee Guide entry likewise names no founder.3 Treat the founder attribution as trade-press folklore until a corporate filing or a signed company statement confirms it, and do not describe anyone as “the owner.”

To verify — the Las Margaritas Rume Sudan lot

A La Cabra product page is cited on this wiki’s Rume Sudan note for a 4.8-hectare plot of pure Rume Sudan at Las Margaritas in Colombia, washed in fermentation tanks and dried mechanically, tasting of lemon and white tea. That page returned HTTP 429 on every attempt, including for this note, so the plot size and the processing detail remain unread at source. The same flag already stands on Rume Sudan.

To verify — lot-level numbers generally

Apart from the Perú 2025 auction, no cupping scores, prices paid or lot IDs tied to La Cabra were found in Best of Panama, ACE, SCA or CQI records for this note. Altitudes and processing details for individual La Cabra releases live on its own rotating product pages, which change each season; they are not stable enough to record here as facts.

Footnotes

  1. La Cabra — About La Cabra — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Perú 2025 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2

  3. Nordic Style Coffee Guide — La Cabra — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. La Cabra — Locations — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

  5. La Cabra — Carmen Caturra (April 2024 farm visit) — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

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