Specialty coffee in Spain.

Spain's coffee problem is called torrefacto. Patented in 1901 and everywhere by the hungry years after the civil war, it meant roasting beans with sugar until they wore a black, glossy shell that kept them for months and hid whatever was wrong with them. Generations grew up on that bitterness and the spoon of sugar that went with it. Specialty coffee in Spain has spent thirty years arguing with it, one clean cup at a time.

The argument started in Barcelona. A family roaster in El Born switched to single origins without sugar in the late eighties, a green-coffee importer had been working the port since 1978, and by the early 2010s baristas coming home from London opened the bars, Satan's Coffee Corner and Nomad among them, that made light roasts and filter coffee normal. Madrid followed with Toma Café in 2011 and has not stopped since.

Today the scene runs from the two big cities down the Mediterranean coast to Valencia, Alicante and Málaga, up to the Basque coast and Galicia, and out into the countryside, where a roaster the big-city cafés stock works from a village in Valladolid province and makes chocolate on the side. The everyday order is still a cortado, just made with better coffee and no sugar.

Barcelona has the founders. Cafés El Magnífico still roasts across from its own counter in El Born. Nomad roasts light in Poblenou and ships across Europe. Right Side, just down the coast in Castelldefels, is run by a three-time Spanish roasting champion and supplies a good share of the country's serious cafés. Hidden, Three Marks and Syra fill out the city, and SlowMov roasts organic lots in Gràcia.

Madrid caught up fast. Toma Café opened the capital's first specialty bar in 2011, Hola Coffee was founded by two national champions who also train the city's baristas, and Randall roasts there too. Beyond the two big cities: Puchero roasts and makes bean-to-bar chocolate in a village in Valladolid province, Sakona roasts in San Sebastián, Astro in A Coruña, Ineffable in Sevilla, and East Crema in Valencia.

Salvador Sans of Cafés El Magnífico walked away from torrefacto before almost anyone. Jordi Mestre came back from London and built Nomad. Joaquín Parra of Right Side has won the national roasting title three times. Marcos Bartolomé opened Satan's Coffee Corner and changed what a Barcelona coffee bar could be. Santiago Rigoni and Patricia Alda gave Madrid Toma Café, and Pablo Caballero and Nolo Botana of Hola Coffee turned competition titles into a roastery and a school. The Mare Terra team in Castelldefels has been importing and teaching since before most of them started.

Barcelona and Madrid share the top of the map, and the Mediterranean coast, the Basque country, Galicia and Andalucía each have roasters worth the trip.

The cortado and the café con leche are still the daily drinks; specialty cafés keep the size and the ritual and change the coffee and the milk texture. Filter, whether V60, AeroPress or batch brew, lives in the city cafés and at home. On the shelf, Colombia, Ethiopia and Brazil anchor most catalogs, and Latin America dominates the way it does nowhere else in Europe: shared language, old trade routes, and Colombia, Peru, Brazil, El Salvador and Guatemala on nearly every list. Ethiopia and Kenya hold the premium filter slots.

Spanish roasters like a story on the bag (producer, farm, process), and the experimental end is busy: anaerobic, thermal-shock and co-fermented lots from roasters like Right Side and Nomad, and rare varieties such as Gesha, Pink Bourbon, Papayo, Chiroso and Sidra as limited releases. After washed, the shelves lean on natural (×235) and honey (×45). Decaf is nearly always a sugarcane-process Colombian these days, and 129 decaf coffees are listed right now. 177 of the current listings are roasted for filter or for both methods.

Spain is not the bargain the supermarket shelf suggests: specialty roasters here price like their counterparts in France or Germany. These figures come from every Spanish coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €55 per kilogram, against €47 across every roaster in the directory.

The ladder reads like this: house espresso blends at the everyday end around €40 per kilogram, washed single origins from about €65 per kilogram, and the rarest bag currently listed at €350 per kilogram. 876 coffees carry a price today. Most webshops split their subscriptions into an everyday tier and a rarities tier, and free domestic shipping usually needs a few bags in the basket.