Specialty coffee in Czechia.

For most of the twentieth century, Czech coffee meant turek: a spoon of fine grounds in a glass, boiling water on top, wait for it to settle. The Italian-style chains arrived in the nineties. Then, around 2010, a roastery outside Prague started buying from farms directly and roasting light, and a whole scene followed within a decade.

Czechia's scene lives in unusual places. Prague has the cafés and the bakeries, but the roasteries that matter are in Liberec, Ostrava, Brno and even Šumperk, a town of thirty thousand with a roastery-café that now runs shops in Olomouc and Prague. Brno, Moravia's capital, is the ideas town: it produced Rebelbean, Fiftybeans and European Coffee Trip, the site half of Europe uses to find a good café.

The common threads are precision and formats. Father's in Ostrava roasts on hot air and sorts every batch by colour. Nordbeans in Liberec colour-codes its ranges so you know what you are buying. And Czech roasters will sell you the same coffee as beans, as a compostable capsule, as a steeped sachet or as a canned lemonade, delivered to a parcel locker by tomorrow.

doubleshot is the pioneer: direct relationships with farms since 2010, a roastery in Zeleneč, a training school and two well-loved Prague cafés with their own bakeries. Nordbeans in Liberec sells three ranges in three bag colours (seasonal single origins, a sweeter everyday line called New Standard, and a "Stars" series of exotic lots) and buys direct from farmers. Father's in Ostrava roasts light on hot air, sorts optically, ships worldwide and helps fund drying beds and labs at the farms it buys from in Uganda and Colombia.

Brno is the roasting town: Rebelbean with its cafés and coffee lemonades, Fiftybeans with a barista of the year at the roaster, MOTMOT in Lelekovice, and Industra, Gill's and Poppy Beans alongside. Prague itself has

Prague has the cafés, Brno has the ideas, and the roasteries are scattered from the German border to Silesia.

Flat whites and cappuccinos pay the rent in the cafés, but batch brew is on nearly every counter and Czechs took to home brewing early: V60, AeroPress, a hand grinder and a kettle with a thermometer. Roasters keep two espresso lines: a bright single origin for the purists and a sweet, chocolatey blend for milk. On the shelf, Colombia, Ethiopia and Honduras anchor most catalogs: Colombia, Brazil, Honduras and Peru under the espresso, Ethiopia, Kenya and Burundi on the filter side.

Filter roasts are light almost without exception. Washed lots are the reference, naturals and honeys sell for their sweetness, and the experimental end (anaerobic, thermal-shock, fruit co-ferments) is where the boutique roasters compete. After washed, the shelves lean on natural (×56) and honey (×21). Formats are a Czech specialty: compostable capsules, steeped sachets, instant specialty and canned coffee lemonades sit next to the bags. Decaf has moved to Swiss Water and sugarcane processes, with 29 decaf coffees listed right now. 58 of the current listings are roasted for filter or for both methods.

Czech roasters price in koruna; the figures here are converted to euros so you can compare across the directory. They come from every Czech coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €56 per kilogram, against €47 across every roaster in the directory.

The ladder reads like this: everyday espresso blends around €43 per kilogram, washed East Africans and single-origin filter lots from about €68 per kilogram, and the rarest bag currently listed at €230 per kilogram. 359 coffees carry a price today. Nearly every roaster runs a webshop with a subscription, free domestic shipping needs a few bags in the basket, and the Zásilkovna parcel lockers get a bag to most of the country by the next day.