We never set out to be written about. We set out to roast coffee we loved, in a town most coffee people couldn't place on a map. But over nineteen years, a strange and lovely thing kept happening: someone would walk into the café, or open a box with our bags inside, or taste a drink we'd made up the day after a party — and then write about it, somewhere far from Helsingborg. This page collects a few of those moments and stories, partly as a scrapbook for ourselves, and partly because together they tell the story of Koppi better than we could tell it alone.
A café in Helsingborg (2007–2017)
When we opened in 2007, we put a drink called Kaffe & Tonic on the menu — espresso poured slowly over ice-cold tonic. We've told the full story of that drink elsewhere, but the short version is that it refused to stay in Helsingborg. Visiting baristas tried it, went home, and put it on their own menus. By the mid-2010s it had reached Japan.
In March 2016, London noticed. The Observer Food Monthly put coffee and tonic at number six on its annual OFM 50 — the fifty things they loved most in food that year: "However bizarre this may sound, trust me, it's good. I tried it last summer at Koppi… and I've been raving about it ever since." The writer even passed along Anne's advice about using plenty of ice. That one meant a lot: a drink from our little bar, on a list between London's most celebrated restaurants.
Around the same time, the American coffee site Sprudge ran a piece on our packaging design, we turned up as a finalist for their Notable Roaster award, and the print magazine Drift devoted a whole volume to Swedish coffee culture and found room for us in it. We closed the café at the end of 2017 to give the roastery our full attention — but the drink, and the writing, carried on without us.
The drink outgrows us
Today the espresso tonic has its own Wikipedia article, which traces it back to us — a sentence we still find slightly surreal. And in October 2024, The New York Times wrote about coffee and tonic water once more, putting it plainly: the beverage "first appeared in 2007 at Koppi Roasters in Helsingborg, Sweden." Read the full article (PDF) — it comes with a cold-brew version of the recipe that we approve of wholeheartedly.
Coffee in the post
Some of our favourite coverage never appeared in a newspaper at all — it arrived in people's letterboxes. Curated coffee boxes ship a few chosen roasters to subscribers around the world each month, and being picked is its own kind of review. Bean Bros have invited us in three times across nearly a decade — 2017, 2021 and 2025. Amsterdam's The Coffeevine has shipped our coffee more than once and called us "Swedish boutique roasters in a class of their own". And Norway's KaffeBox regularly slips us into their Scandinavian selection, in company we're proud to keep. If you like the idea of coffee in the post, we do it ourselves too: our own monthly subscription ships straight from the roastery.
Friends and visitors
Coffee people have kept finding their way to Helsingborg. Our friends at European Coffee Trip told the espresso & tonic story at length; Scandinavia Standard went looking for the perfect cup of Koppi. Beyond these, a small world of coffee blogs — from Sweden to Japan — has written about the coffees over the years, and we read all of it.
And lately
In 2025, Sprudge gave us their Sprudgie Award for Best Design & Packaging — the bags you see on this site, the ones we've fussed over for years. And Roastful, who taste their way through the world's best roasters, ranked us sixth among their top hundred.
We're grateful for every word of it — not because the clippings matter in themselves, but because each one usually means the same thing: somewhere, someone tasted the coffee and wanted to tell somebody else. That's the whole job, really. If you'd like to taste what they were writing about, the current coffees are here, and the story continues one harvest at a time — from Helsingborg, since 2007.