Specialty coffee in Madrid.

Madrid drank its coffee the old way for a very long time: a café con leche at the neighbourhood bar, the beans dark and glossy with torrefacto sugar, the taste more about habit than flavour. Then, in the summer of 2011, an Argentine and his partner opened a small espresso bar on Calle de la Palma in Malasaña, ground single origins to order, and asked customers to try it without sugar. Toma Café was not the only thing that changed, but it is where most people start the story.

What grew from there has a shape of its own. The cafés cluster in the centre, Malasaña, Chamberí, Lavapiés and the Salamanca district, while the roasting machines sit further out, in Carabanchel, San Fernando de Henares and Móstoles. A barista champion and a roasting champion built a roastery and a school in the south of the city. A market stall in Chamberí sells cascara next to the vegetables. And a bakery-café model, sourdough in the morning and natural wine at night, turned out to suit the city better than the bare Nordic counter ever did.

Madrid also became the place the Spanish coffee trade meets. Coffee Fest at the IFEMA fairground brings the national championships and the international crowd to the capital every February, and the city's roasters compete against each other the rest of the year.

The city's roasters split into people who roast where they pour and people who roast where the space is. Hola Coffee runs its roastery and training school on Avenida Pedro Díez in Carabanchel and pours in Lavapiés and on Calle Lagasca, with blends named after the barrios and a sugarcane decaf called No Molestar. Toma Café roasts in Chamberí for its three venues and for restaurants across the city. Randall roasts in San Fernando de Henares and sells from a stall in the Mercado de Vallehermoso. The Fix started as a café pouring London's Assembly and bought its own machine. Boconó roasts on Calle de Embajadores at the edge of La Latina and won the city's roasting competition in 2023.

The list goes well beyond the famous names. Mospresso, Cero, Cafés Guayacán, Nubra, Roses Roast and Lady Madrid all roast in the city with ranges of their own. Out in Móstoles, Supracafé, the Arabica-only pioneer from 1992, roasts for hotels, restaurants and its own webshop, and Cafés 1808 keeps a long list of its own. East Crema, the crowdfunded chain, roasts its own medium-roast Arabica for its shops and for offices.

Santiago Rigoni and Patricia Alda opened Toma and taught a neighbourhood to drink coffee black. Pablo Caballero, Spanish barista champion in 2016 and cup-tasting champion before that, and Nolo Botana, a roasting-championship regular, built Hola into a roastery, a café group and a school. Barry Randall brought small-batch roasting to the region in 2013 and services espresso machines across the city. Hugo Jiménez and Marta Castillo turned The Fix from a guest-roaster café into a roaster. Alberto Velarde scaled East Crema with crowdfunding. Ricardo Oteros bought a farm in Colombia for Supracafé. And Carlos Nuñez runs Boconó with a roasting trophy on the shelf.

Madrid's cafés live in the old centre and the roasteries live on the edge. The pattern is easy to walk once you know it.

Cortado, café con leche and, increasingly, a flat white, poured with fresh milk or a barista oat. Espresso and milk drinks carry the cafés; pourover and batch brew are there for the enthusiasts and the visitors. The shelf tells the same story: Colombia, Brazil and Ethiopia lead Madrid's listed origins, washed leads the processes with natural behind it, and Latin American coffees dominate in a way that Northern Europe's shelves do not.

The roast is the tell. Madrid's roasters mostly stop short of the very light Nordic style, aiming for caramel sweetness and body while keeping the origin's acidity, a profile built for customers who grew up on torrefacto. The premium end is where it gets adventurous: anaerobic and thermal-shock lots, Pink Bourbon and Sidra, Colombian varieties like Ombligón and Ají, and Gesha from Colombia, Peru and Panama. Decaf is taken seriously, mostly sugarcane-process Colombians. The live count stands at 10 decaf and 5 filter-friendly listings.

Everyday espresso blends from the roastery-cafés, standard single origins in the middle, and Gesha and experimental lots at the top: Madrid's ladder is a clear one. These numbers come from every Madrid coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €53 per kilogram, about €13 for a standard bag.

The ladder reads like this: house blends and washed Latin Americans around €44 per kilogram, East Africans and the first anaerobic lots from about €64 per kilogram, and the most expensive listing right now at €350 per kilogram. 74 coffees carry a price today. Most roasters sell in the café first and online second, and the bigger ones run subscriptions and sell kilo bags.