A short introduction

Tim Wendelboe is a roastery, espresso bar, and coffee training centre in Oslo. We have been roasting to order every week since 2007 and shipping coffee to home enthusiasts, offices, restaurants, and coffee shops all over the world.

Since the beginning, we have been based in the same small shop at Grünersgate 1 in Grünerløkka. In 2018, the roastery moved a few blocks east to Tøyengata 29c, while the espresso bar remained in its original location.

We buy green coffee directly from producers in Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador, and we visit them every year. We also publish what we pay, as transparency is at the core of what we do.

Since 2019, we have been farming coffee ourselves at Finca El Suelo in Huila, Colombia.

The beginning of a coffee journey

Tim started working as a barista in Oslo in 1998 at a small chain called Stockfleths. At the time, they had three stores. He was nineteen. He quickly took over the store he was working in and began trying to improve how they made coffee. In 2002, he opened another espresso bar for Stockfleths together with his friend Alexander Scheen Jensen, and together they eventually rebuilt the quality profile across all six Stockfleths stores. By 2005, he was head of staff training and quality control.

Between 2001 and 2004, he competed. He won the Norwegian Barista Championship in 2001, 2002, and 2004, finished second at the World Barista Championship in 2001 and 2002, and finally won it in 2004. In 2005, he also won the World Cup Tasters Championship.

In early 2006, he left Stockfleths. He spent that year working as a freelance consultant and barista trainer.

Opening the Espresso Bar

We opened the doors on the 30th of June, 2007. The space we moved into used to be a hair salon run by the woman who owned the building. Her father was a mason, and he laid the stone façade in the 1890s. If you look closely at the entrance, there are two silhouettes of heads carved into the stone, a quiet reminder of what the room used to be.

Tim chose Grünersgate deliberately. It is off the main street, and he did not want a shop that people wandered into by accident. He knew we were going to do things differently from most coffee shops, and he wanted our guests to arrive with an open mind, to know roughly what we were about before they pushed the door open. The budget was also limited, and the only rents he could afford were on side streets. And we needed the quiet: we roasted inside the shop in those early years, and the machine is not a silent neighbour.

From day one, the espresso bar has sold only coffee. We tried pastries briefly when we opened, but the quality available in Oslo at the time was inconsistent, and we were not going to become bakers. We would rather do one thing and do it well than spread ourselves across many and accept the compromises that come with it.

The menu changes daily. The only additions to the coffee are milk and sugar. In a sense, the espresso bar has always functioned more as a showroom for our coffees than as a café.

15th Anniversary Video Special