13 stores · curated ORBIS register
Small-batch roasting and coffee service share Espresso Lab Microroasters's premises at Cape Town's Old Biscuit Mill, where it opened in 2009. Espresso and filter coffee feature alongside coffee cocktails at the Woodstock counter, using the roaster's single-origin selections. Origin Coffee Roasting combines coffee roasting with a barista academy, following Joel Singer's founding of the Cape Town business in 2005. Rosetta Roastery roasts traceable single-origin lots without blends, drawing on coffees from Africa and the Americas as well as Asia.
Cape Town
Cedar Coffee Roasters, run by "two simple guys from Cape Town," roasts coffee beans sourced from Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya and Costa Rica and sells decaf, seasonal blends and compostable coffee pods from a unit at Side Street Studios, 48 Albert Road, Woodstock. It also sells brewing equipment such as drippers, French presses, grinders and scales.
Best for Single-origin roasted coffee beans and brew gear
South Peninsula, Cape Town
Coffee Guy Roasters operates a roastery in Fish Eagle Park, Kommetjie, in Cape Town's South Peninsula and a flagship coffee shop at Noordhoek Garden Emporium on Noordhoek Main Road. It sells freshly roasted Arabica beans plus croissants and breakfast rolls, with free delivery around Cape Town on orders over R500.
Best for Freshly roasted arabica coffee beans
Cape Town
Enmasse Tea Merchants was founded in 2011 in Cape Town with the aim of elevating the art of daily tea drinking, sourcing products locally where feasible. It sells loose leaf teas grouped into Everyday, Health and Exotic ranges, along with tea accessories and tea chocolate.
Best for Loose leaf blended tea
Old Biscuit Mill, Woodstock, Cape Town
Espresso Lab has roasted small-batch coffee at Woodstock's Old Biscuit Mill since 2009, serving precise espresso, filter coffee, latte art and coffee cocktails from the same Cape Town spot.
Best for Traceable single-origin coffee and Nordic-leaning roasts
Espresso Lab Microroasters was founded in Cape Town in 2009 by husband-and-wife team Renato Correia and Helene Vaerlien, who built the roastery around a Scandinavian-influenced program: fully traceable single-origin beans and light, Nordic-style roast profiles at a time when darker, blended roasts were still the norm in South African coffee. The original roastery and cafe opened at The Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock -- a converted former biscuit factory that became one of the anchors of the neighborhood's redevelopment -- putting Espresso Lab at the center of Cape Town's third-wave coffee scene from the late 2000s onward. The company has since become a reference point for specialty coffee in the city, built on direct-producer relationships and fair-trade sourcing rather than blended commercial lots, with its V&A Waterfront counter extending that same roasting program and single-origin, traceable-lot approach to Cape Town's tourist harbour front. Correia has been recognized individually within South Africa's coffee industry, including a Cape Mocha Awards nomination. More than fifteen years after opening, Espresso Lab remains one of the longer-running independent microroasters in Cape Town, having helped establish the light-roast, traceable-origin style much of the city's specialty coffee scene has since adopted as a baseline rather than a point of differentiation.
Cape Town / Online
Founded in 2005 by Joel Singer, Origin was among Cape Town's first specialty roasters. Its barista academy has since trained 3,500 baristas and five national champions.
Best for Hand-roasted African coffee from the academy that trained 3,500 SA baristas.
Origin opened in late 2005, one of the first artisan roasters to set up in Cape Town, at a time when the city's specialty coffee scene barely existed as a category. Joel Singer and the founding team built the business around a simple ambition: prove South African coffee could meet international specialty standards rather than settle for commodity-grade imports.
The roastery's flagship sits in De Waterkant, where coffee is still hand-roasted on site — the company describes itself as roasting "at the southernmost tip of Africa," leaning into direct relationships and repeat visits to origin-country growers rather than buying through blind auction lots.
Origin's other lasting contribution to South African coffee is educational rather than retail: its barista academy trained roughly 3,500 baristas and produced five national barista champions before the program transitioned into the independent African School of Coffee. That training pipeline, as much as the roastery itself, is why Origin gets credited with helping build the country's specialty coffee workforce rather than just selling beans into it.
Today the business runs as a hybrid — café, online retail and wholesale supply to hotels and restaurants — nearly twenty years after it started as a single roastery.
Woodstock
Single-origin coffee roaster founded in 2010 in Cape Town's Woodstock district by Rob Cowles, Jono le Feuvre and Jeffrey van Aswegen; roasts only traceable single-origin lots from Africa, Central/South America and Asia, no blends.
Best for Specialty roaster focusing on African coffees with a tasting bar in Woodstock
Rosetta Roastery was co-founded by Jono Le Feuvre and runs a tasting bar in Woodstock, Cape Town's specialty-coffee district, built around a selective sourcing process: the team says it cups more than 150 different coffees a year and keeps only the ones that clear a high bar for quality, rather than filling out a standing catalogue with safe, easy-to-source lots. The current list leans toward South American origins — Peru and Brazil feature prominently — alongside the African coffees the roastery has built its reputation on. Rosetta splits its lineup into two house categories, "Classic" and "Progressive," a way of signalling roast philosophy up front rather than leaving customers to guess whether a bag will taste like a familiar dark-roast standard or a brighter, more experimental profile. The team treats coffee as something that "doesn't stay static," adjusting roast profiles on an ongoing basis rather than locking in a fixed recipe per origin once it's approved.
Cape Town
The Tea Chest, founded by Ieva Tomase, is the sole distributor of TWG Tea in Southern Africa and also introduced the Nordic herbal tea brand PLUKT to South Africa, including five new PLUKT herbal teas such as Lady's Mantle and Cowslip. It sells white, green, oolong, black, rooibos and herbal teas along with tea accessories and teapots.
Best for Imported loose leaf and herbal tea
City Centre, Cape Town
David Donde opened Truth in 2012 inside an 1898 Victorian warehouse on Buitenkant Street. Architect Haldane Martin's steampunk design has made it one of the world's best-known cafés.
Best for Steampunk Cape Town roastery in an 1898 Victorian warehouse
David Donde opened Truth Coffee Roasting in 2012 on Buitenkant Street, having taught himself to roast during an earlier career as a hotelier — he'd supply freshly roasted coffee to weekend guests before turning the hobby into a business. The site he chose was an 1898 Victorian warehouse, stripped back during renovation and rebuilt around a steampunk aesthetic designed by architect Haldane Martin.
Martin's brief drew a direct line between the visual complexity of espresso machines and roasters and the Victorian-futurist fantasy of steampunk design: the finished café is dense with saw-blade tabletops, exposed steel plating, black cabling and overstuffed booths, built to look mechanically ornate rather than minimalist. The roasting equipment itself sits in view, part of the design rather than hidden behind a counter.
The combination — Donde's self-taught roasting background paired with Martin's maximalist industrial design — has made Truth one of Cape Town's most internationally written-about cafés, cited repeatedly in design and coffee press for the same reason: it looks like nowhere else serving coffee.
Durban North, Durban
Trading as Durban's Coffee Company, Colombo Coffee and Tea roasts specialty single-origin and blended beans from Africa and the Americas at its Durban North cafe, alongside cafe equipment, training programs and wholesale supply for other Durban businesses.
Best for Trading as Durban's Coffee Company
Trading as Durban's Coffee Company, Colombo Coffee and Tea runs its cafe and roastery from Adelaide Tambo Drive in Durban North, after consolidating operations there from an earlier site on what was Gale Street (now Magwagaza Maphalala Street) in Lower Glenwood. The company roasts specialty coffee sourced from Africa and South and Central America, selling both single-origin lots - Burundi and Ethiopia among them - and named blends such as Aggressive Chocolate and Athari, the latter marketed under a 'Positive Impact Coffee' line pointing to a direct-trade or farmer-support angle in its sourcing. Beyond retail bags for home brewing, the business supplies professional cafe equipment, runs coffee training programs, and operates a wholesale arm serving other cafes and businesses, positioning itself as infrastructure for Durban's wider coffee trade rather than only a shopfront. The name nods to tea as well as coffee, though the bulk of the published range and the roastery's own emphasis sits squarely on specialty coffee. For a city where much of the coffee scene runs through a handful of roasters, Colombo's combination of cafe, training arm and wholesale supply gives it a wider footprint in Durban's coffee trade than a single retail counter would.
Milpark, Johannesburg
The roaster that describes itself as South Africa's first Fairtrade-certified coffee roaster, founded in 2005. Bean There buys direct from small-scale farmers across seven African countries, roasting single-origin lots at its Johannesburg flagship.
Best for South Africa's first Fairtrade roaster, sourcing direct from African farms since 2005.
Bean There opened in 2005 as South Africa's first Fairtrade-certified coffee roaster, at a moment when the country's specialty coffee culture barely existed. The company built its identity on paying farmers directly rather than working through intermediary exporters, a structure it argues keeps small-scale growers' operations sustainable rather than merely compliant with a certification label. Its single-origin lots come from seven African countries — Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda — sourced through those direct grower relationships rather than blended commodity stock.
The roasting profile leans medium-dark, aiming for what the company describes as a bold, full-bodied cup: dark cocoa, toasted caramel and earthy spice notes rather than the lighter, brighter roasts common among third-wave African-focused roasters. That's a deliberate positioning choice — Bean There markets clarity of origin alongside richness, rather than chasing acidity-forward profiles.
Two decades on, the roaster operates a flagship space at 44 Stanley, Johannesburg's converted-warehouse retail and dining precinct, alongside its original fair-trade sourcing mission. The through-line from 2005 to today is the direct-trade structure itself — not just a marketing claim, but the mechanism by which the company sources every bag it sells.
Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Located at 14 Reserve Street at the corner of De Korte in Braamfontein, The Commune describes itself as a Pan-African, socialist and feminist bookstore and coffee shop that also stocks records focused on African music, and hosts book launches, talks, film screenings and DJ sets.
Best for African-focused books and records
Simondium (near Franschhoek), South Africa
Babylonstoren is a 1692 Cape Dutch farm near Franschhoek whose 8-acre, 300-plant garden supplies its own rooibos and honeybush tea, wine, olive oil and produce, served at the Babel restaurant and sold in the farm shop.
Best for Farm-grown rooibos, honeybush, wine and olive oil
Babylonstoren occupies one of the oldest Cape Dutch farms in South Africa, established in 1692 at the foot of the Simonsberg mountain between Franschhoek and Paarl. The estate's defining feature is its garden, redesigned from 2007 by French garden architect Patrice Taravella, whose earlier work on the kitchen garden at Notre-Dame d'Orsan caught owner Karen Roos's attention. Spread across roughly eight acres, the garden holds more than 300 edible or medicinal plant varieties arranged in 15 clusters — vegetables, stone and pome fruit, citrus, berries, nuts, bees, ducks and chickens among them — and every restaurant and shop on the property draws directly from what's in season there.
Alongside its wine cellar and olive grove, Babylonstoren has built a tea programme around the Cape's own fynbos plants: rooibos and honeybush, sourced organically from a Cederberg supplier and, more recently, grown on the farm's own Simonsberg slopes. Both are naturally caffeine-free, with rooibos's fruity red infusion and honeybush's honeyed, floral cup sold loose or bagged in reusable tins from the farm shop. The Babel restaurant and the Greenhouse eatery cook from the same beds, so a visit can move from garden rows to a cellar tasting to a pot of estate-grown honeybush without leaving the property.
Woodstock
Kopi Botol is an Indonesian-style coffee shop with traditional brewing methods and a unique menu. At Woodstock, the range centers on Indonesian-style coffee shop with traditional brewing methods and a unique menu.
Best for Indonesian-style coffee shop with traditional brewing methods and a unique menu
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