Philocoffea
Philocoffea is a Japanese specialty-coffee roaster, wholesaler and café group founded in November 2017 and based in Funabashi, a commuter city in Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo. Its founder and representative is Tetsu Kasuya, who won the 2016 World Brewers Cup and then published the routine he won with as the 4:6 method.12
The name is a deliberate compound: “philosophy” plus Coffea, the botanical genus of the coffee plant. The company’s own English site explains it as thinking deeply about the coffee industry’s possibilities, with the coffee tree standing for the source of the whole business.2
That naming tells you where the company sits. Most of the Japanese roasteries on this wiki are known for what they buy — Maruyama Coffee and Saza Coffee are recognised names on Cup of Excellence and Best of Panama bid sheets. Philocoffea is known for what its founder taught. Its public reputation runs through technique given away for free rather than through the auction room, which is a genuinely different route into the Japan coffee market.
The company
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Established | November 2017 |
| Representative | 粕谷哲 — Tetsu Kasuya |
| Capital | ¥5,000,000 |
| Employees | 35, as of November 2025 |
| Head office | Funabashi-shi, Chiba Prefecture, Japan |
| Phone | 047-460-9400 |
| Business | Sale of coffee beans, brewing equipment and coffee-related products |
Every row above is taken from the company’s own Japanese corporate-information page.1 Thirty-five staff in eight years is a real business rather than a champion’s side project, though still small next to a UCC Ueshima Coffee or a Doutor Coffee.
Shops
The English site currently lists three locations:2
| Shop | Where | Hours | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PHILOCOFFEA Omotesando | B1F GREEN TERRACE Omotesando, 3-8-15 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo | 10:00–19:00 |
| 2 | PHILOCOFFEA Platts Narashino | Proceed Keisei Okubo, 3-8-21 Motookubo, Narashino-shi, Chiba | 10:00–18:00 |
| 3 | PHILOCOFFEA Shapo Funabashi | 1F Shapo Funabashi South Building, 7-1-1 Honcho, Funabashi-shi, Chiba | 10:00–21:00 |
Two of the three sit inside station retail complexes — Shapo is the shopping centre attached to Funabashi station, Platts is the one at Keisei Okubo. That is a very Japanese distribution choice, and a different animal from a destination roastery: the customer is a commuter, not a pilgrim. The Omotesando site is the exception and the statement — Omotesando is Tokyo’s luxury retail spine, and putting a champion’s café there is a premiumisation move as much as a retail one.
What it says specialty coffee means
Philocoffea publishes its own four-part working definition of specialty coffee, and it is unusually plain-spoken:3
- Location — you can trace the beans directly to the farm they were raised in.
- Cultivation — how the coffee was grown is part of the quality, not background detail.
- Hand-picking — cherries are picked by hand, which in practice means selective picking of ripe fruit rather than stripping a branch.
- Sustainability — the extraction and handling are done with care and sustainability in mind.
Notice what is not in there: a cup score. The Specialty Coffee Association’s traditional line is an 80-point cupping threshold, and the newer Coffee Value Assessment adds more axes. Philocoffea’s definition is about traceability and how the fruit was handled instead — closer in spirit to direct trade than to grading. Kasuya’s stated sourcing habit fits it: he visits farms himself and describes selecting coffee for the producer’s care and story alongside the cup.3
Why it is in this wiki
Philocoffea is the commercial half of the Tetsu Kasuya story, and the two notes are best read together — his covers the 2016 championship, the 4:6 method and the published competition recipe in full.
The company is also the reason the 4:6 method has an institutional home. Its site describes the method as a brewing technique based on a scientific approach to extraction, and the business sells the beans, the drippers and the teaching around it. A championship that could have ended as a line on a CV instead became a product line, a café group and thirty-five jobs — which is the clearest example on this wiki of what a world title can be converted into when the winner is a teacher by instinct. Compare Simple Kaffa, which converted Berg Wu’s 2016 barista title into a café and a place on record Best of Panama bid sheets — same starting point, very different second act.
To verify
The co-founder, the mission statement and the motto. The research behind this note reports that Philocoffea’s English “Our Story” page names Masami Kaji as co-founder, gives the mission as “to enrich the lives of people everywhere through the medium of coffee”, and gives the motto as “Delivering coffee everywhere.”4 That page returned HTTP 429 on three attempts from this machine and could not be read directly, so all three are recorded here as claims attributed to the company’s own site, not as confirmed facts. No second source for Masami Kaji was found. Note also that the Tetsu Kasuya note describes the company as founded by Kasuya “and a group of friends” — a named co-founder would sharpen that, once confirmed.
To verify
The head-office address, and stale third-party listings. The corporate page’s registered address reads 〒273-0024 Funabashi-shi, Chiba with block number 1-1544-1, but the district name rendered differently between two reads of the same page (藤原 / Fujiwara versus 海神町南 / Kaijincho Minami) — almost certainly a character-encoding problem rather than two addresses, but it is not settled here.14 Separately, older listings give retail addresses at 2-2-13 Honcho and 2-3-29 Honcho and hours of 10:00–17:00 closed Mondays and Tuesdays45 — none of which match the current official shop list above. Treat any Philocoffea address or opening time found on a third-party directory as out of date; use the official site.
To verify
The number of shops, and the Omotesando opening date. This wiki’s Tetsu Kasuya note says the company runs three shops in Chiba plus an Omotesando flagship opened in March 2025 — four in total. The official English site read for this note lists three shops altogether, only two of them in Chiba, and gives no opening date for Omotesando.2 One of the two is out of date or counts differently (a roastery or a closed site, for instance). The store count and the March 2025 date should both be re-checked against the company’s own Japanese store page before either is quoted.
To verify
Business scope: wholesale and café operation. The corporate page as read here lists the business as sale of coffee beans, brewing equipment and coffee-related products.1 The research report reads the same page as listing in-house roasted specialty coffee sales, wholesale (卸売) and café management (カフェ経営).4 The cafés plainly exist, so the reading is probably right, but the exact registered business description is not confirmed.
To verify
What does not exist: auction records. No cupping score, auction lot, hammer price, farm altitude or processing method is published by Philocoffea for any specific coffee on the pages consulted, and no Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or Alliance for Coffee Excellence result names Philocoffea as a buyer in anything read here.1234 This matters because the Japanese roasters around it in this wiki — Maruyama Coffee, Saza Coffee — are documented auction buyers, and it would be easy to assume Philocoffea is one too. Any lot, score or price attached to this company should be treated as invented until an official auction record shows otherwise.
Related
- Tetsu Kasuya — the founder, 2016 Brewers Cup champion and author of the 4:6 method
- World Brewers Cup — the title the company was built on the back of
- Japan coffee market · Kissaten — the home market it sells into
- Maruyama Coffee · Saza Coffee — the Japanese roasteries known for buying at auction rather than for teaching
- Simple Kaffa — the other 2016 champion’s company, and the other way to spend a world title
- Hario — the V60 maker whose ceramic dripper the 4:6 method was built on
- Specialty coffee · Coffee Value Assessment · Cupping — the standard definitions its own four criteria sit against
- Direct trade · Green coffee buying · Selective picking — the sourcing model its criteria describe
- Coffee roasting · Pour-over brewing — the craft either side of the counter
- Specialty Coffee Association of Japan — runs the national qualifiers its founder came through
- Premiumisation — the shift the Omotesando shop is riding