Specialty coffee in France.

France drank bad coffee for a long time and knew it. The espresso at the zinc counter was dark, bitter and often part robusta, a habit built by decades of trade with former colonies, and you took it with sugar. Then, in 2005, a former Guatemalan diplomat opened a coffee house by the Hôtel de Ville that served single origins by the cup and talked about where they came from, and the argument started.

Twenty years on, Paris has roasters in most arrondissements, a reservation-only tasting counter that serves coffee like a tasting menu, and specialty on the menu at Michelin-starred restaurants and La Grande Épicerie. Lyon, Bordeaux and Marseille have roasteries of their own, and the map runs on through Nantes, Toulouse, Lille, Strasbourg and Montpellier.

Two things mark the French version out. The first is the torréfacteur. The neighbourhood roaster is an old French institution, and the new wave borrowed the word and the shopfront. The second is the boat: some of the country's green coffee now crosses the Atlantic under sail, which cuts most of the shipping emissions and gives the bag a story.

Paris has the founders. Terres de Café runs several boutiques, a rare-lot collection it calls Légendes, and ships some of its green coffee by sailing boat. Coutume roasts for a long list of Paris restaurants and hotels. Belleville Brûlerie roasts light, owns cafés including La Fontaine de Belleville, and has a second roastery in Tokyo. KB roasts at its Back in Black site near Bastille, Lomi trained a good share of the city's baristas, and Tanat roasts in the 18th and sells from a shop on Avenue Victoria.

Then there is Substance: a counter in the 2nd you book like a restaurant, where Joachim Morceau serves competition-grade lots (Geshas, experimental fermentations) in courses, with no takeaway. It is the most Parisian thing in French coffee.

Outside the capital, Mokxa got Lyon started in 2011 and Celsius and Placid roast there now. Placid refuses to make a blend at all. Bordeaux has L'Alchimiste and Mirabilis, with the green importer Belco a few kilometres away in Mérignac. Marseille has Deep by the Vieux-Port. Cafés Muda roasts in Lille, Judicieux, Au Bon Café Clavreul and Café LouLé in Nantes, OTEKA, Cafés Di Costanzo and La Brûlerie Victor Hugo in Toulouse, and Bibal, Café BUN and Le Petit Moulu in Montpellier.

Gloria Montenegro opened La Caféothèque and taught Paris to cup. Christophe Servell built Terres de Café from a family roasting tradition. Antoine Nétien and Tom Clark opened Coutume. David Nigel Flynn gave Belleville its look and its roast style. Aleaume Paturle founded Lomi and its barista school. Sadry Alexandre Abidi took specialty to Lyon with Mokxa, and Tony Collins to Marseille with Deep. Alexis Gagnaire of Tanat stood on the World AeroPress podium in 2019. Joachim Morceau invented the coffee tasting menu at Substance. And Narumi Sato, world siphon champion in 2016, runs Belleville's Tokyo roastery.

Paris holds the founders and the density, but French specialty spread fast after 2011, and every big regional city now has a roaster with a following beyond its own streets.

The espresso at the counter is still the national drink, and the specialty roasters have kept the ritual and changed the coffee: a clean single-origin shot, no sugar needed. Filter came in behind it, V60, Chemex and AeroPress, and flat whites and cortados took over the milk side from the old scalded-milk café au lait. On the shelf, Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala anchor most catalogs, with Guatemala, Peru, Costa Rica and El Salvador filling the single-origin lists.

French roasters like a label with detail on it: producer, altitude, process, sometimes the cup score. Washed and natural lots carry most catalogs, honeys fill in from Central America, and anaerobic and co-fermented coffees have moved from the competition stage to the shop shelf. After washed, the shelves lean on natural (×202) and honey (×43). Look for Bourbon Pointu, the low-caffeine variety from Réunion (French territory, and a point of pride), alongside Gesha, Sidra and Pink Bourbon at the top end. 59 decaf coffees are listed right now, and 150 of the current listings are roasted for filter or for both methods.

Paris is not a cheap place to roast coffee, and the labels here carry a lot of information that costs money to gather. These figures come from every French coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €40 per kilogram, against €47 across every roaster in the directory.

The ladder reads like this: house espresso blends at the everyday end around €32 per kilogram, washed single origins from about €60 per kilogram, and the rarest bag currently listed at €392 per kilogram. 931 coffees carry a price today. Most roasters sell subscriptions, rotating discovery boxes or discounted refills of the house espresso, and ship free within mainland France once your basket reaches a few bags.