Starting a coffee roastery in Engelberg

We often get the question "how do two swedes end up starting a coffee roastery in Engelberg"? Being a Swede in Engelberg is probably the least far fetched considering how many Swedes live and work in Engelberg. Roasting coffee?! - that's probably where the curiosity strikes in and to all fairness we must add. Neither Switzerland nor Sweden are famous for their coffee production. Any business idea in the area of chocolate, cheese, meatballs or "easy" mountable furniture would have been more "expected".

There is however a simple explanation to how we ended up roasting coffee in Engelberg – the simple fact that there was no one roasting coffee in Engelberg at the time. The way we saw it; every village should have a local bakery, a local butcher, a local cheese shop and of course a local coffee roastery. Although Engelberg is a everything BUT an old, forgotten village, the scent of coffee being roasted was still unfamiliar to many, what unroasted green coffee beans looked like was still unseen for many and the taste of a freshly roasted cup of coffee was a cheap luxury yet to be discovered by many. And so our mission to make Engelberg the ”Coffee Mecca” in the Swiss Alps began.

Luckily we were not that unfamiliar to the world of coffee when we started our roasting career in 2015. Our father and lifelong coffee professional introduced us to roasting coffee at a very young age. During our summer holidays in Sweden, he used to spend many mornings on the sunny porch roasting coffee samples from around the world in his ancient mini Probat roaster. The sound of the beans roasting in the drum, the sight of the green coffee beans gradually turning brown and the smell of freshly roasted coffee is a profound childhood memory. With this crash course as kids in how quality coffee should smell, look and taste like we were naive enough to think we could do this as a profession 15-20 years later. If there's a will, there's a way and somehow it turned out pretty darn good.